Deal with the Devil

by Peter Lance

  • In 1994, after Alkaisi was initially indicted by the SDNY in the World Trade Center bombing,41 he was allowed to make a plea deal and was released after serving only eighteen months on a minor immigration charge.42

  Perhaps most significant, these 302s, together with another FBI memo from a 1996 debriefing of an al-Qaeda turncoat, prove a direct link between Osama bin Laden and the Kahane murder.43 The chilling details are contained in my Playboy piece on Salem and another article I wrote for Tablet magazine entitled “First Blood.”44*

  In a series of confessions given to JTTF investigators and an SDNY prosecutor, Kuwaiti immigrant Nidal Ayyad, who helped supply the chemicals for the 1993 World Trade Center bomb, described how he had been the wheelman of a three-man Shalabi hit team including Salameh and Alkaisi.

  Salameh, Ayyad, Alkaisi

  In one 302, Ayyad described how the trio gained entry to Shalabi’s home in the gated Sea Gate community as he was preparing to flee back to Egypt. Using a silenced .22 provided by Alkaisi, Salameh shot Shalabi twice in the head, but the big Egyptian got up and chased the smaller Palestinian after the gun jammed. At that point, Alkaisi pulled out a knife and started stabbing Shalabi, whereupon Salameh put a new magazine in the gun and fired four more shots, finishing the job. The three fled the bloody crime scene, leaving Shalabi with thirty puncture wounds from Alkaisi’s blade.45

  The murder took place precisely two years to the day before the WTC blast executed by Ramzi Yousef.

  The Lost Opportunity to Connect the Dots

  When it comes to the Shalabi murder—as with other aspects of this counterterrorism investigation—the question again is, what did the FBI know about the crime and when did they know it? They thought the homicide important enough to subpoena witnesses before a grand jury and remove key forensic evidence from the NYPD property clerk’s office in 1993. Yet for unknown reasons, the Feds shut the investigation down the following year and didn’t effectively reopen it again for another decade, when they began to question Nosair and Ayyad.

  Since Mustafa Shalabi was killed in Brooklyn and homicide is a state crime, I contacted Assistant District Attorney Mike Vecchione in the Kings County DA’s office and informed him of the evidence unearthed in those FBI 302s that implicated Ayyad, Salameh, and Alkaisi in the murder. After a brief e-mail exchange in January 2011, Vecchione referred me to his office’s homicide bureau.

  When I didn’t get a response, I contacted Jerry Schmetterer, the DA’s media liaison, and explained the trajectory of my investigation, which began with the revelation about the .22 from Emad Salem. I told him that Detective James Moss, from Brooklyn South Homicide, had reinvestigated the bloody slaying and asked whether the DA’s office would take steps to locate Bilal Alkaisi, named by both El Nosair and Ayyad as the lead killer. I even offered to furnish the district attorney with copies of the 302s.46 The day after I sent him that e-mail, Schmetterer got back to me with this reply: “Peter, We have read the materials and I have discussed this with our Chief of the Homicide Bureau and we will not be commenting.”47

  Why Should We Care?

  How is all this related to the FBI’s relationship with a Mafia killer that spanned more than three decades? Why should we be concerned today, in 2013, whether the Bureau failed to stop the first attack on the World Trade Center twenty years ago? Certainly there is value to correcting the historical record when it comes to the FBI’s performance in countering terrorism and suppressing organized crime. But the real value comes in considering George Santayana’s prediction that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”48

  The killing of Osama bin Laden during a raid by the Navy’s Seal Team Six on May 2, 2011, represented a significant advance in the “war on terror” and a true victory for the Obama administration. But prior to bin Laden’s death, how many opportunities had the New York Feds blown in their inability to slow his deadly juggernaut?

  As for why any of that matters now, consider that as late as early 2013, there was continuing violent unrest throughout the Middle East over demands to release Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the spiritual leader of al-Qaeda, whom Patrick Fitzgerald and Andrew McCarthy convicted in 1995 thanks to Emad Salem.49

  The Blind Sheikh is the linchpin connecting much of the contemporary violence in the Arab world to the FBI’s decades-long terrorism investigations. But for years, U.S. intelligence analysts have failed to appreciate his key role in the hierarchy of al-Qaeda.

  Beginning in 1996, the FBI received the first of three warnings that bin Laden would attempt to hijack a plane to free the Sheikh.50 When al-Qaeda took credit for the embassy bombings in 1998, the Sheikh’s release was one of their demands.51 Weeks before the attack on U.S.S. Cole in October 2000, al-Zawahiri and bin Laden appeared in a video fatwa, demanding that the Sheikh be set free.52 Rahman was cited in that infamous Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) to George Bush in August 2001,53 and just days before the 9/11 attacks the Taliban government in Kabul offered to swap a group of U.S. missionaries for the Blind Sheikh. As recently as April 22, 2005, in entering a plea, Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called twentieth hijacker in the 9/11 plot, declared that his goal in seizing a plane to fly into the White House was to free the Blind Sheikh.54

  Meanwhile, the blind cleric himself, in federal prison since 1993, has demonstrated extraordinary staying power. In mid-December 2006, while in custody at the U.S. Medical Center in Springfield, Missouri, the sixty-eight-year-old Rahman was diagnosed with a tumor on his liver and rushed to an area hospital after spitting up blood.55 It was believed at the time that he was near death and the FBI issued a bulletin warning that the Sheikh’s last will and testament, distributed by al-Qaeda in 1998, had exhorted his followers to “extract the most violent revenge” after he died.56

  Then, exhibiting the kind of Rasputin-like resilience demonstrated by Greg Scarpa Sr., Rahman not only pulled through, but began to thrive. He was eventually moved to the Federal Medical Center at Butner, North Carolina, where his continuing influence on world events became clear in the summer of 2012.

  Impacting the Egyptian Election

  In June 2012, just before the new elections in Cairo, Emad Salem learned through Egyptian sources that the Sheikh, then seventy-four, had managed to issue a fatwa from prison endorsing the presidency of Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate for president.57 Soon, followers of the Blind Sheikh started rallying in Tahrir Square, demanding his release.58 The day after Morsi’s narrow victory, Salem discovered that Sheikh Omar, who is supposed to get a single, fifteen-minute “humanitarian” call to his family each month, was able to make a second call congratulating the president-elect.59

  Within days of his election, Morsi returned the favor by declaring, at a huge rally in Tahrir Square in front of Abdel Rahman’s family, that he would press for the freedom of Sheikh Omar and other Egyptian terrorists convicted in the United States.60

  After Morsi’s call for the Sheikh’s release, the issue became a cause célèbre for the political right in the United States. “U.S. State Dept. Considers Release of Blind Sheikh to Egypt” was the headline on the late conservative Andrew Breitbart’s website in September. Two days later, the New York Post ran a headline referencing President Barack Obama: “O Eyes ‘Blind Sheik’ Release: GOPers Blast Idea to Appease Egypt.”61

  In response, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made it clear that the Sheikh had been rightfully convicted,62 and she emphatically denied that the United States had plans to extradite him.63 But there’s little doubt that the September 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which killed the U.S. ambassador and three other diplomats, was tied to growing violence related to Abdel Rahman. By September 13, CNN was reporting that one group thought to be responsible was called “the Imprisoned Omar Abdul Rahman Brigades.”64

  “What happened in New York two decades ago,” says Emad Salem, “is still causing blood to be spilled in the Mideast and threatening U.S. security. The Sheikh is the prin
ce of jihad and even from inside a prison cell he wields tremendous power.”65

  Rahman’s deadly influence as a rallying point for jihadists was reinforced on October 28, 2012, when bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, issued a two-hour video calling on Muslims worldwide to kidnap westerners and “spare [no] efforts” to free Sheikh Omar.66

  Such developments leave no doubt that the threat to world security posed by Omar Abdel Rahman, the leader of the terror cell spawned in New York in 1989, continues to resonate. But what lessons can be learned from that going forward? A case in point that takes us back to the organized crime story involves a mailbox and check-cashing store in Jersey City, first detailed in Triple Cross.

  Sphinx Trading

  As far back as 1991, FBI agents were onto a storefront called Sphinx Trading on Kennedy Boulevard, located in the same building as the Blind Sheikh’s al-Salam mosque.

  Within weeks of Rabbi Meir Kahane’s murder, the Feds knew that El Sayyid Nosair kept a mailbox at the store. Three years later, Patrick Fitzgerald and Andrew McCarthy put the store’s co-incorporator, Waleed Abdu al-Noor, on a list of 172 unindicted co-conspirators that included bin Laden, Ali Mohamed, and Mustafa Shalabi.67 But by 1997 the top investigative goal in the FBI’s New York Office was “getting” Gambino family boss John Gotti.68 So the Bureau’s priorities were misplaced. At that time the NYO was conducting virtual round-the-clock surveillance of Gotti’s Ravenite Social Club—the same location where prosecutors claimed Vic Orena had met with the “Dapper Don.”

  As noted in a Huffington Post article I wrote, if the Feds had devoted just a portion of the surveillance resources that they’d dedicated to the Ravenite to Sphinx, they could have been in the middle of the 9/11 plot months before Black Tuesday.69*

  Why? Because in July 2001, Khalid al-Midhar and Salem al-Hazmi, two of the 9/11 “muscle hijackers,” got their fake IDs delivered to them in a mailbox at Sphinx. The man who supplied them was Mohammed El-Attriss, Sphinx’s co-incorporator with Waleed Abdu al-Noor.70 How difficult would it have been for the Feds to connect those dots? But in their obsession with defeating the “Mafia enemy,” FBI officials allocated massive resources against Cosa Nostra at a time when the al-Qaeda threat to New York was metastasizing.

  Sphinx Trading, located on Kennedy Boulevard below the al-Salam mosque

  How Safe Are We from the Terror Threat?

  The Boston Marathon bombings, nearly twelve years after 9/11, gave Americans shocking cause to ask how safe they should feel with the FBI guarding their homeland. How many of the 508 terror prosecutions since 9/11 represented viable threats? In April 2012 the New York Times reported: “Of the 22 most frightening plans for attacks since 9/11 on American soil, 14 were developed in [FBI] sting operations”—that is, with help from undercover agents.71 In his 2013 book The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, Trevor Aaronson wrote that, of those 508 defendants, he “could count on one hand” the number of genuinely dangerous terrorists prosecuted by the government.72 One exception was another FBI failure: the May 2010 Times Square bombing plot.73 After the device fizzled, the NYPD brought terrorist Faizal Shazhad to ground in fifty-three hours.74 But the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) had actually had Shazhad on their radar as early as 2004.75 He’d trained at a Pakistani terrorist camp, returning just three months before parking a WMD in the theater district undetected by the FBI. Then, after the Boston bombings, it emerged that the Bureau had vetted and cleared Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011 after a request from Russian authorities.76 Two stunning counterterrorism failures that may point to the Bureau’s lack of capability in the language of terror.

  In May 2012, Senator Daniel Akaka (D-HI), the chairman of a Homeland Security subcommittee, held his seventh hearing on what he termed “a national security crisis”: the lack of foreign language skills at the intelligence agencies.77 Six months later, I wrote the FBI to ask how many agents and management they had who were fluent in Arabic, Urdu, and Farsi. They replied: “The FBI has over 100 Special Agents who speak Arabic, Farsi, and/or Urdu [and] over 340 full and part time linguists who speak, or provide services, in Arabic, Farsi, and/or Urdu.”78 To put that number in context: By 2009 the FBI had roughly 5,000 SAs working counterterrorism.79 That barely 2 percent are fluent in the language of the “enemy” is some measure of the FBI’s preparedness to stop the next domestic terror threat.

  Now that the leadership of New York’s Five Families has been decimated, the question is, has the Bureau learned its lesson? If the events of January 20, 2011, are any indication, the answer is no.

  The “Epic FBI Bust”

  That was a line in the subtitle of a story filed on the website of NBC’s New York flagship station announcing the “FBI’s biggest Mafia bust.” On January 20, 2011, in a massive sweep across three states,80 127 men were arrested and charged with more than eight hundred mob-related crimes.81

  Attorney General Eric Holder announcing the mass Mafia arrests

  (Robert Stolark/The New York Times/Redux)

  Attorney General Eric Holder called it “one of the largest single-day operations against the Mafia in the FBI’s history, both in terms of the number of defendants arrested and charged and the scope of the criminal activity that is alleged.” He went on to say that the massive bust “sends the message that our fight against traditional organized crime is strong, and our commitment is unwavering.”82

  But beyond the headlines and the colorful news footage of multiple “perp walks,” an examination of the indictments tells a somewhat different story. Of the 127 arrested, only thirty were made members. Some of those charged were geriatric mobsters, ages eighty-three, seventy-six, seventy-four, seventy-three, and sixty-nine. Many of the indictments were for petty infractions, including bookmaking, loan sharking, gambling, and possession of contraband cigarettes. One of those indicted was charged in a homicide that took place during a home invasion in 1992;83 one double murder involved a dispute over a spilled drink at a bar in Queens.84

  Yet the cost of this new investigation was enormous. The authorities acknowledged that informants had recorded thousands of conversations by suspected mobsters.85 Seemingly to justify the expense and counter the notion that the Mafia had been degraded, Janice Fedarcyk, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York Office, noted that “arresting and convicting the hierarchies of the five families several times over has not eradicated the problem.”86 So much for the 1986 prediction by former SDNY U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani that the Mafia Commission case would “crush” Cosa Nostra.87

  But Bruce Barket, who had defended Craig Sobel during the Lin DeVecchio prosecution, disagreed with Fedarcyk, telling Reuters that the Cosa Nostra menace was long ago replaced by a new threat, from Albanian and Russian gangsters. “Privately, law enforcement officials will tell you there isn’t anybody left” in the old-school Italian mob, he said.88

  The question, from a security standpoint, is whether those mass arrests in 2011 amounted to a final attempt by the FBI to maintain its relevance as a mob-busting force at a time when the al-Qaeda threat continues to loom. If that was the strategy, then one of the highest-profile Mafia prosecutions in years proved that the Justice Department still suffers from the same pathology that infected the Colombo war prosecutions.

  The Trial of “Tommy Shots”

  In May 2012, Thomas “Tommy Shots” Gioeli, the accused acting boss of the Colombo family, was acquitted of six homicides by a federal jury, largely because they didn’t believe the testimony of the cooperating witnesses the Feds used to prosecute him.89 It was a kind of replay of the Orena brothers’ acquittal in 1995.

  Gioeli had been one of the shooters who had stalked Joseph Peraino and his son Joe Jr. in the 1982 incident that caused the death of former nun Veronica Zuraw. A onetime Orena loyalist who switched to the Scarpa faction during the war, Gioeli was also charged with the murder of Wild Bill Cutolo, who disappeared in May 1999 after he’d been promoted to underboss.90 In October 2008,
the FBI started searching a field in East Farmingdale, Long Island.91 The body they unearthed, wrapped in a tarp, was identified as Cutolo’s.92

  Thomas “Tommy Shots” Gioeli

  (New York Daily News)

  Gioeli had also been charged in the 1992 Colombo war pastry shop murders of John Minerva and Michael Imbergamo.93 Since virtually all the evidence against him for the Cutolo and Long Island hits was based on the word of other mobsters, Gioeli walked on the murder charges, though he was convicted of racketeering and murder conspiracy.94 Described in the Times as “a blow to prosecutors,” the limited victory against Tommy Shots was some indication of how far the DOJ can go today in prosecuting cases that hinge largely on the hearsay of other wiseguys.

  “There’s also a question about how Justice should be devoting its resources,” says Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer, whom I interviewed in September 2012 after the Benghazi attack. “It’s patently clear that al-Qaeda remains a lethal threat. Consider the massive resources the FBI spent in those mass mob arrests and how those resources might be better directed in the years ahead. My main concern with the Bureau and the other intelligence agencies is whether they’ve learned from their mistakes and they’re committed to true reform, or will they continue to defend old ground?”95

  A COINTELPRO vs. the Mafia

  From the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, the FBI ran an illegal domestic spying operation dubbed the Counter Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO.96 The secret initiative, in which J. Edgar Hoover initially authorized special agents to spy on a series of leftist groups, including the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party as well as white hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan, later grew into a domestic intelligence-gathering operation whose targets included the Black Panther Party and a number of antiwar groups during the Vietnam War.97