The Terror Factory

by Trevor Aaronson

  The day I visited Hossain in March 2012, he was wearing a prison-issued, button-down blue shirt with gray pants. His name and prisoner number were embroidered on the left side of the shirt. Less than halfway through his sentence, he didn’t have a lot of hope of being released early. His initial appeal had been denied, and he was now drafting a second appeal himself, enlisting other inmates to help him with the spelling and grammar.

  We sat across from each other on plastic chairs in an empty concrete room. Toys filled a small adjacent room, for when inmates receive their families. A bank of vending machines lined one of the walls. Three guards stood in the corner talking about baseball. From having researched Hossain’s case, I knew that Hussain, the informant, was a bad actor—a scam artist and an aggressive prevaricator who was, as FBI Special Agent Timothy Coll put it so well, “good at being deceptive.”35 But I found it hard to reason away Hossain’s inaction during the sting operation. For example, on November 20, 2003, when Hossain came to Hussain’s warehouse to drop off the seventy-five dollars for his brother Kyum’s state identification card, the FBI informant showed him the shoulder-fired missile and said in Urdu, “This is for destroying airplanes.” Hossain didn’t leave and report the missile to authorities. He just sat there, and then replied with a statement most Americans would think incriminating: “Holy is Allah.” I also could not understand why, even if Hossain thought the money the informant gave him was for a loan, he’d accept cash from a man he’d seen shouldering a missile as he bragged about knowing mujahideen.

  Stroking his beard, which is long and gray and hangs down to his waist, Hossain tried to explain himself. “You have to understand,” Hossain told me. “He hounded me. Everywhere I went, he was there.” From the day Hussain gave the toy helicopters to Hossain’s children in front of the Little Italy Pizzeria, he said, the informant became a fixture in his life. Hussain said he wanted to become a better Muslim and admired Hossain for his faith. Despite being busy, Hossain said he felt a religious obligation to talk to Hussain about Islam. He’d walk into the pizza shop’s kitchen, and Hussain would follow him, asking questions. “I told him once I have to go deliver pizzas, and he said, ‘No problem, I’ll come with you.’”

  During their conversations, Hussain would often talk about himself, describing how he ran an import business bringing in goods from China—the kind of cheap and small items you find in dollar stores—and bragging about having a relationship with the FBI. Once, when Hossain described some problems he was having with a tenant, Hussain offered to call his FBI friend and ask if he could assist. Hossain demurred. He had no reason to suspect Hussain was anything but a legitimate businessman with influential friends in law enforcement. That’s what he said he was thinking when Hussain pulled back the tarp at the warehouse and lifted a missile launcher to his shoulder.

  “It looked like a telescope or some plumbing equipment,” Hossain told me. “Then he said it was a missile. You have to understand what I was thinking. Do you remember when Iraq was at war with Iran? Who did America back? Iraq. They sent weapons to Iraq. In Afghanistan, America gave weapons to the mujahideen to fight the Soviets. He said he had licenses to import from China and that he knew an FBI agent. I believed it was a legitimate business, that what he was doing was legal. I couldn’t prove it wasn’t legal. I ran a pizza shop, and every day, I would make sure the floors were clean and dry, and if they were slippery, I’d put up a sign. I knew that if I didn’t and someone fell, they’d sue me. They’d hurt me and my family. So what if I went to the police and told them about Malik and the missile? I thought he could sue me for a false report, and he would take all my money and all my properties.” Hossain added that Hussain came to the pizza shop the day after showing him the missile and assured him that everything was legal and on the up and up.

  At one point, the FBI informant asked Hossain if he’d be interested in donating money to a school in Pakistan. “I told him that even if I had money, I wouldn’t be interested,” Hossain said. “But I also told him that I didn’t have money then. I told him that I purchased two homes from the city auction, and I needed $3,000 to $4,000 to buy new boilers.” Hussain said he could help and offered to loan him $50,000. “I didn’t need his money. I could have gotten the money from other people,” Hossain told me. “But I wanted him to go away. I thought if I agreed to do something with him, he’d leave me alone. People are like that—they bother you until you do what they want and then they leave. I thought that would happen.” As a result, Hossain agreed to accept the loan, and to this day maintains that he did not know that what he was doing could be considered money laundering or that the money was supposed to have come from a terrorist organization. “Why would I be a terrorist? I had a family, a business, nearly $1 million in properties,” Hossain said. “If someone did a terrorist attack in Albany, it would have hurt me just like everyone else. My family would have been in danger. My business would have been hurt. I have never had anything to do with terrorism.”

  Hossain suffers from diabetes and hypertension, and incarceration has been hard for him. But it’s been even harder for his family, he said. He was the sole breadwinner, and in the wake of his trial and incarceration, he and his family lost the pizza shop. But he lost much more in the following years. “Children need a father. My children, they are lost to the world now,” he said.

  I asked him what he meant by that.

  “They fall into the wrong crowd,” he said. “I do not know them anymore.”

  He then pointed to the appeal he is drafting—a thick stack of paper with amateur copyediting notes on the pages correcting typos and grammatical errors. The appeal described the FBI informant’s aggressive behavior and particular instances in which Hossain alleged his Urdu statements were mistranslated to sound more incriminating than they actually were. He has already lost one appeal that his lawyers filed, so this jailhouse petition doesn’t offer him much promise. But it’s all he has now—a final effort to reverse a decision by a jury he believes was overwhelmed by the government’s claims and biased by his appearance.

  “Look at me,” Hossain said. “My beard, my face, my taqiyah—I look like Osama bin Laden.”

  Hossain paused.

  “I hate Osama bin Laden.”

  Since 9/11, Shahed Hussain and informants like him have become one of the Bureau’s most valuable commodities in the war on terrorism—aggressive men indentured to the FBI who are willing to do anything to take down their targets and who also have the ability to “play the part” of terrorists in front of hidden cameras and microphones. This ability to betray others for personal gain, however, reveals a dark aspect to the FBI’s use of informants; namely, that the best informants are also those who tend toward criminal behavior themselves. Hussain is a classic example of this. While working for the FBI, he filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection in 2003, claiming $145,075 in personal assets, including his $125,000 home, and reporting $177,766.72 in debts. According to the filing, Hussain owed, among other debts, $18,377.72 to the Albany County Treasurer and $30,000 to HSBC Bank. Through the bankruptcy court, Hussain delayed payment to his creditors and negotiated lower settlement amounts for some of the debts.

  But the FBI informant never told the bankruptcy court about some substantial assets he had, including an expensive Mercedes he said his family had been given by an old friend, former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, and $500,000 in a trust fund in Pakistan.36 While in bankruptcy reorganization, Hussain transferred the money from Pakistan to the United States and, in an apparent effort to hide his connection to the money, deposited the cash in a bank account in his son’s name.37 Hussain then used some of that money to purchase and fix up a run-down hotel near Saratoga Springs, New York. He listed the hotel—originally called the Hideaway Motel but renamed the Crest Inn Suites and Cottages—in his wife’s name.38 Hussain’s actions as a hotelier were reportedly as dishonest as his dealings as an FBI snitch, as three would-be guests sued him for fraudulent misrepresentation after th
ey prepaid for hotel rooms that were not available upon arrival.39 In addition, the reviews the hotel has received on TripAdvisor are poor, with two guests claiming to have been cheated while staying there.

  But none of this crooked activity seemed to matter to the FBI, which made Hussain a paid informant after the Aref case. In all, Hussain spent four and a half years serving FBI agents in and around Albany, receiving $60,000 in expenses and working off his criminal charges related to the DMV scam. Staying on with the Bureau was Hussain’s preference, as well. “I liked to work with the FBI,” he said.40

  In 2007, FBI agents in Albany called their counterparts in White Plains, New York, and offered them the use of Hussain as an informant. FBI Special Agent Robert Fuller, who was involved in the extraordinary rendition of Maher Arar, a dual Canadian Syrian citizen detained at John F. Kennedy International Airport and then deported to Syria and tortured, accepted the offer.41 He sent Hussain to Pakistan to investigate a possible terrorist camp and then to London to check out a mosque that was allegedly raising money for Palestinians in Gaza. Each time Hussain returned to the United States, Fuller met him at Kennedy Airport to make sure immigration officials allowed him back into the country. As we saw in the case of Foad Farahi, the FBI often uses shaky immigration status as a means of keeping informants, even paid ones, on a leash.

  Despite his international travels, Hussain’s most ambitious assignment under Fuller would come closer to home. In September 2007, the informant began praying regularly in Newburgh, a struggling former Air Force town with few decent jobs about an hour north of New York City. It was a fishing expedition. “I was not looking for targets,” Hussain said in court testimony. “I was finding people who would be harmful, who can do harm, and radicals, and identify them for the FBI.”42 As in the Albany case, Hussain’s cover story was that he imported goods from China, and Fuller instructed him to tell people that he was an agent for the Pakistani terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed. Most of Newburgh’s Muslim residents were poor, and Hussain, who posed as a wealthy businessman and wore expensive clothing and drove high-end cars, easily made plenty of friends. But after more than a year of trawling the local Muslim community, he had not identified a single target.43

  Then he met James Cromitie, a forty-five-year-old stocker at the local Walmart. A former drug addict with a history of mental instability—he once admitted to a psychiatrist that he heard and saw things that weren’t there—Cromitie had adopted the name Abdul Rahman after converting to Islam while serving two years in prison for selling crack cocaine in 1987.44 However, by 2008, he had seemingly turned his life around. He had a job, a girlfriend, and a room he rented, and he prayed regularly at Masjid Al-Ikhlas, a large, tan-colored mosque. Below the surface, though, Cromitie was an angry, bigoted man, believing others discriminated against him because of his religion, and openly hating Jews.

  In June 2008, Cromitie met a man from Pakistan at Masjid Al-Ikhlas who said his name was Maqsood. Everyone at the mosque had seen or knew of Maqsood. It was impossible not to know about him, because in poor Newburgh, Maqsood made an impression. He was always driving one of four expensive cars—a Hummer, a Mercedes or one of two different BMWs—and had been coming to the mosque so frequently that he had been invited to become a board member.44 Of course, the man’s name wasn’t really Maqsood—it was Shahed Hussain.

  It was in the parking lot of Masjid Al-Ikhlas that Cromitie first approached Hussain. The two men began talking, and Hussain told Cromitie that he was destined for much more in this life. “Allah didn’t bring you here to work for Walmart,” he said.46 What exactly happened between the pair in the weeks following that initial encounter in the parking lot isn’t known, because from June to October 2008, Special Agent Fuller chose not to have Hussain record these conversations. But whatever happened and whatever was said, it allowed Hussain and Cromitie to become close.

  By the time the FBI began recording their conversations on October 12, 2008, Hussain was already an experienced hand at fueling Cromitie’s bigotry and bolstering his personal narrative of persecution as a misunderstood Muslim.

  “A lot of Jews up here. They look at me like they would like to kill me when they see me inside my jalabiya, everything they say. I don’t salaam them either,” Cromitie told Hussain.

  “Does that make you angry, brother?” Hussain asked, clearly knowing the answer he was soliciting.

  “It doesn’t make me angry. It just make [sic] me want to jump up and kill one of them,” Cromitie said.

  “Wow,” Hussain replied.

  Cromitie then talked about the Jews he met while working at Walmart. They looked at him strangely, he said, and the Jewish women refused to allow him to carry their bags to the car.

  During the course of their conversations, Hussain would seize on any opportunity to amplify Cromitie’s paranoia and hatred of Jews. “I was reading in one of the newspapers, in the New York Times, that every second advisor in the White House, they yahuds,” Hussain told Cromitie during one meeting.47

  “Every who?” Cromitie asked.

  “Every second advisor to the president is a yahud,” Hussain repeated.

  “In the White House?”

  “Yeah,” Hussain said.

  “The worst brother in the whole Islamic world is better than 10 billion yahudi,” Cromitie answered.

  Hussain told Cromitie that if he was angry for the way the world was, he could change it. But he needed to change it through jihad. “I always think about going for a cause, you know? For a cause of Islam. Have you ever thought about that, brother?” Hussain asked.

  “Have I ever thought about going for the cause?” Cromitie asked.

  “Cause of Islam,” Hussain clarified.

  In November 2008, Hussain invited Cromitie to attend the Muslim Alliance in North America conference in Philadelphia. The local imam from Masjid Al-Ikhlas would be there, as would one of Cromitie’s idols, Imam Siraj Wahhaj, an African American convert to Islam whose mosque is in Brooklyn. Hussain offered to cover all of Cromitie’s expenses, which of course were covered by the FBI. By this time, Hussain had told Cromitie about his import business and said he could bring in weapons and missiles from China. Not to be outdone by Hussain’s peacocking, Cromitie portrayed himself in conversations with the informant as something of a badass, claiming to have firebombed a police precinct, to have a brother who stole $126 million in merchandise from Tiffany & Co., to have formed a small militia, and to have stolen guns from Walmart.48 These claims were all untrue. Whether the FBI knew at the time that Cromitie was nothing but talk is unclear, but the conference in Philadelphia would prove to be a turning point for Hussain and the Bureau.

  It was late at night on Friday, November 28, 2008, and Hussain and Cromitie were driving to Philadelphia in the FBI informant’s Hummer. The vehicle had been wired for sound, and all of their conversations during the nearly four-hour trip were recorded. About halfway through the drive Cromitie went silent.

  “What are you thinking, brother?” Hussain asked.

  “I’m just thinking that I’m gonna try to put a plan together. What type of plan? I don’t know yet. I’m gonna put a good plan together,” Cromitie answered.

  “May Allah be with you and Allah find you the way,” Hussain said.

  The next day, Hussain and Cromitie attended the conference in Philadelphia, where they saw the imam from Newburgh and listened to an inflammatory speech Siraj Wahhaj gave during a dinner. In their private conversations, Hussain kept asking about a security group Cromitie claimed to have formed to protect Newburgh-area Muslims—Cromitie called the group his “sutra team”—and what type of actions they had done in the past.

  “We couldn’t get hold of a bomb like we wanted to, but we was doing all type of stuff,” Cromitie said. “You probably heard. We was blowing police cars up. We was throwing gas bombs inside.” Cromitie was lying about all of it, of course. But he did know a few thugs-for-hire, Newburgh men who he said would be willing to join an attack for the right
price. “They would do it for the money,” Cromitie told Hussain. “They’re not even thinking about the cause.”

  Later that same day, Hussain asked Cromitie what he thought would be the best target for a terrorist attack. Cromitie’s response was a bridge. “But bridges are too hard to be hit, because of they’re, they’re made of steel,” Hussain told him.

  “Of course they’re made of steel,” Cromitie said. “But the same way they can be put up, they can be brought down.”

  If Hussain and the FBI were going to bring Cromitie into a terrorist plot, they needed to guide him toward a more manageable idea than bombing a bridge. A few days before the Philadelphia conference, the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba had killed 364 people in a coordinated attack in Mumbai, India, that targeted hotels, a café, a railway station, and a Jewish community center. Special Agent Fuller instructed Hussain to bring up the Mumbai attacks, which he believed would help dissuade Cromitie from his ambition to bomb a bridge.

  “Eight spots were hit at the same time,” Hussain told Cromitie, referring to the terrorist attack in India.

  “Yeah, yeah, eight, I saw it,” Cromitie replied.

  “You saw it. The railroad station. Hotels, the Jews—”

  “Yeah,” Cromitie interrupted.

  “The Jew center, the main Jew center,” Hussain continued.

  “Yahudi,” Cromitie said.

  “Yahudi center. Uh, the cafés where the Americans, and there’s this, uh—”

  “That too,” Cromitie interjected. “The cafés and shit like that. Sometime the biggest people be in these places and you don’t know, but shit happens. You understand?”