Deal with the Devil

by Peter Lance

  I asked Greg Jr. what he would do with his freedom if he is granted that hearing and succeeds in getting released after twenty-four years behind bars.

  “All I can tell you is that if I have a chance to get out and live on the outside for the first time in all these years, I will do everything I can to set the record straight on what my father did. I can’t bring back the lives he took or the people he ordered to be whacked, but I can try and make the name Gregory Scarpa stand for something other than ‘killer’ and ‘made guy.’ After all this time inside, one of the things I learned is that it’s how you finish that counts, not how you start out.”14

  AFTERWORD

  Philip L. Graham, the former publisher of the Washington Post, is credited with describing daily deadline journalism as “the first rough draft of history.”1 If that’s the case, investigative journalism gives us the second draft. Unlike beat reporters, who are subject to the tyranny of the ticking clock, an investigative reporter has the luxury of digging into a story in depth over time. As the layers get peeled away, one lead begets another, and eventually, if the reporter is tenacious, a broader understanding of the truth will emerge. That’s just what I found when my initial focus on the FBI’s counterterrorism performance led me to Ramzi Yousef, and in turn that probe, through Greg Scarpa Jr., led me to the questionable relationship between his father and Lin DeVecchio.

  In 2003, when I began the reporting for my second HarperCollins book, Cover Up, I wasn’t setting out to tell a Mafia story. But when I came upon the treasure trove of FBI 302s documenting Greg Jr.’s eleven-month sting of Yousef, I couldn’t look away. Now the detailed pursuit of that organized crime story has put the terrorism story into sharper focus, and I’m happy to report that the central allegation in my first book on Yousef—denied for years by the Justice Department and the 9/11 Commission—has been confirmed by the Feds.

  In 1000 Years for Revenge, I offered prima facie evidence from the Philippine National Police of a direct connection between Yousef’s bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and the “planes as missiles” plot realized on September 11, 2001—a plot that Yousef designed and set into motion in Manila in the fall of 1994.

  It was ultimately carried out by his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the al-Qaeda terrorist identified by the FBI in 2002 as 9/11’s “mastermind.”2 In 1000 Years for Revenge, I reported that as early as 1995 federal prosecutors in the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) became aware of the link between Yousef and KSM, who had been operating out of the Philippines in a cell that also included Abdul Hakim Murad, a commercial pilot trained in four U.S. flight schools who had been the intended lead pilot in the first configuration of “the planes operation.”3 But for years prominent DOJ officials and the 9/11 Commission staff refused to accept that the two attacks on the Twin Towers were executed by the same terrorists, or that they were directly funded by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

  Staff Statement No. 15 from the 9/11 Commission, published in August 2004, stated that “whether [Ramzi Yousef] became a member of al Qaeda remains a matter of debate,” calling him “part of a loose network of extremist Sunni Islamists.”4

  In a 2005 interview, Patrick Fitzgerald, the former head of the Organized Crime and Terrorism Unit in the SDNY, said, “People assume that the World Trade Center bombing was an al Qaeda operation. . . . I’ve never assumed that. . . . What I would say is, we learned that the World Trade Center bombing and the Day of Terror plots were part of a jihad network. I wouldn’t necessarily conclude that that was al Qaeda.”5 But in 2010, positive confirmation that the two attacks were linked came when the SDNY unsealed the fourteenth superseding indictment against Yousef for the 1993 bombing. That indictment included his uncle KSM, who was now charged for the 9/11 attacks.

  A New York Times piece dated April 10, 2010, confirmed that this latest indictment affirmatively linked the Trade Center bombing to the attacks of September 11, 2001.6 “It runs 80 pages,” the story said, “with almost half devoted to a list of 2,976 [9/11] victims.”7 All fourteen indictments can be accessed via the Times website.8 The cover pages on the two key indictments hare the same docket number: 93 Cr. 180 (KTD). The last three letters are the initials of Kevin T. Duffy, the federal judge who has presided over the case from the first World Trade Center bombing trial in 1994.

  The original WTC indictment, March 31, 1993, and the fourteenth superseding indictment, April 2010

  The decision by federal prosecutors to include KSM in the ongoing series of terrorism cases spawned by the 1993 Twin Towers bombing is proof positive that the plots and cell members were inextricably bound. They were not, as the 9/11 Commission staff characterized them, “part of a loose network.” Further, the fact that the two attacks on the WTC were part of an ongoing conspiracy, funded by bin Laden and al-Qaeda, underscores the case I made in my third book on terrorism, Triple Cross, that various officials in the FBI and the SDNY who had knowledge of the Yousef-KSM Manila connection in 1995 were negligent in failing to connect the dots years before Khalid Sheikh Mohammed sent American Airlines Flight 11 crashing into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

  New Proof the FBI Could Have Stopped the 1993 Bombing

  Another central allegation in 1000 Years for Revenge was that the FBI had sufficient warning to have prevented the 1993 bombing by Ramzi Yousef, which claimed six lives and left a thousand people injured. In that book I chronicled a series of events leading up to Yousef’s planting of a 1,500-pound urea-nitrate fuel-oil device on the B-2 level beneath the North Tower around noon on February 26, 1993.

  The first evidence came three and a half years earlier, in July 1989, when FBI agents followed a group of “MEs”—a Bureau term for “Middle Eastern men”—from the al-Farooq mosque on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn to the Calverton shooting range at the end of Long Island.9 Firing a series of weapons, including AK-47s and handguns, the group included Mahmoud Abouhalima, a.k.a. “the Red,” a six-foot-two-inch Egyptian cabdriver; Mohammed Salameh, a diminutive Palestinian; Nidal Ayyad, a Kuwaiti who had graduated from Rutgers University; and El Sayyid Nosair, a janitor from Port Said, Egypt, who worked in the basement of the civil courthouse in Manhattan.10

  FBI Calverton surveillance photo (Abouhalima is third from left)

  Each of those terrorists-in-training was instructed by Ali Abdel Saoud Mohamed, the central figure in Triple Cross.11 The details of Mohamed’s extraordinary terror spree can be found at http://www.peterlance.com/wordpress/?p=1703.

  A former Egyptian army commando from the very unit that killed Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981,12 Mohamed succeeded in infiltrating the CIA briefly in Hamburg in 1984, slipped past a watch list to enter the United States a year later, enlisted in the U.S. Army, and got posted to the JFK Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, where elite Green Beret officers train. From there, he traveled on weekends to New York City to school the Calverton shooters in paramilitary techniques.13

  Ali Mohamed was so trusted by Osama bin Laden that he was dispatched to move the Saudi billionaire’s entire entourage from Afghanistan to Khartoum in 1991, set up al-Qaeda’s training camps in the Sudan, and train bin Laden’s personal bodyguards. He was also one of the principal planners in the simultaneous truck bomb attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 that killed 223 and injured thousands.14

  As a further testament to his skills, Abouhalima, Salameh, and Ayyad, three of his Calverton trainees, were later convicted in the World Trade Center bombing plot, while Clement Hampton-El, a U.S.-born Black Muslim, was convicted with Nosair in the 1993 “Day of Terror” plot to blow up the bridges and tunnels into Manhattan, along with the United Nations building and the skyscraper that houses the FBI’s New York Office.15

  Abouhalima, Salameh, Nosair, Ayyad, Hampton-El

  One of the lead FBI investigators on that Calverton surveillance was NYPD detective Tommy Corrigan, who later went on to work directly with Squad I-49, the “bin Laden Squad,” in
the Bureau’s NYO. For unknown reasons, the surveillance of those MEs was suspended. But the FBI got its next chance to interdict the WTC bombing plot a year later with the arrival in New York of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called Blind Sheikh. Rahman, the spiritual emir of al-Qaeda, had somehow managed to get a CIA-approved visa, slip past a watch list, and land at John F. Kennedy International Airport in July 1990.16

  Within months, the Sheikh began to quarrel openly with Mustafa Shalabi, a tall, strapping Egyptian émigré who ran the Alkifah Center at the al-Farooq mosque.17 The Alkifah was the principal U.S. office for the Makhtab al-Khidamat (MAK), a worldwide center of storefronts where millions of dollars in cash was collected to support the Afghan war against the Soviets.18 In November 1989, after the MAK’s founder was killed by a car bomb, Osama bin Laden and Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri merged their new terror network with the MAK. So by early 1990, al-Qaeda had what amounted to a New York clubhouse at Shalabi’s Alkifah Center. And soon Sheikh Omar began to covet the funds still pouring into the center on Atlantic Avenue.19

  The First Blood Spilled by al-Qaeda in the United States

  By the fall of 1990, El Sayyid Nosair had joined the al-Gamma’a Islamiyah (IG), the Blind Sheikh’s ultra violent group, and he was itching to make his bones for the jihad. He set his sights on Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the ultra nationalist Jewish Defense League, who advocated the removal of all Arabs from Israel.20 On the night of November 5, 1990, as Kahane left the podium of the Morgan D Room at the East Side Marriott hotel, Nosair lunged forward and fired the same .357 Magnum that had been photographed by the FBI at Calverton sixteen months before. Struck in the neck by one shot, the rabbi was blown to the floor.

  Meir Kahane after the shooting

  (Shannon Taylor)

  Outside the hotel, Nosair was wounded in a shootout. A pair of ambulances rushed him and the rabbi to Bellevue Hospital. Nosair survived, but Kahane died.

  After the killing, Abouhalima and Salameh, who were to have been Nosair’s getaway drivers, regrouped at his home in Cliffside Park, New Jersey. But they were soon taken into custody after the house was raided. Detectives and FBI agents seized forty-seven boxes of evidence proving an international bombing conspiracy, with the World Trade Center as a target.21 Among the files seized were maps of the Twin Towers. A passage inside Nosair’s notebook called for the “destruction of the enemies of Allah . . . by . . . exploding . . . their civilized pillars . . . and their high world buildings.”*22

  The presence of these documents, not to mention Abouhalima and Salameh, clearly pointed toward a conspiracy in the Kahane murder. Yet the very next day, the NYPD’s chief of detectives, Joseph Borelli, concluded that the killing was a “lone gunman” shooting. More astonishing, though the raid on Nosair’s house was led by the FBI, which had the Calverton surveillance photos of Abouhalima, Salameh, and Nosair (firing the very gun used on Kahane), the Red and Salameh were released within hours and never charged in the crime.23 Years after the 9/11 attacks, the House-Senate Joint Inquiry revealed that Osama bin Laden himself had helped pay for Nosair’s defense.24

  The next significant warning of al-Qaeda’s ongoing involvement with the Calverton cell came in February 1992, with the murder of Mustafa Shalabi.

  Death of a “Bad Muslim”

  Even though it was Shalabi himself who sponsored Sheikh Omar’s entry into the United States, he balked when the blind cleric demanded half of the Alkifah’s million dollars in annual income.25 By the late summer of 1990, in speeches in area mosques, the Sheikh began denouncing Shalabi as a “bad Muslim.”26 Rahman even suggested that his fellow Egyptian was embezzling the Alkifah’s funds. On February 26, the eve of the Gulf War, Shalabi hurriedly packed for a flight to Cairo, where his family was waiting. He never made it to the airport.

  Mustafa Shalabi’s body

  A few days later, a neighbor of Shalabi’s noticed that the door to his Sea Gate, Brooklyn, apartment was open. Shalabi was sprawled on the floor.27 “He was knifed, shot and beaten with a baseball bat,” said former Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) investigator Tommy Corrigan. “This wasn’t some . . . genteel thing. He was made an example of.”28

  Detectives from the NYPD’s Sixty-First Precinct took control of the crime scene. In the course of their investigation, they discovered that more than $100,000 in Alkifah cash was missing from the apartment.29 Abouhalima came in and identified the body, falsely claiming that he was the victim’s brother. Neither the Red nor the Blind Sheikh was ever charged.30

  The murder remained an open cold case in the files of the Sixty-First Precinct until the end of June 2010, when I uncovered evidence from the JTTF that not only solved the Shalabi murder but identified a second gunman in the Meir Kahane assassination. I also discovered a recording of a phone conversation made by a top FBI undercover operative. It contained an admission by a senior JTTF agent that the Bureau could have prevented the 1993 Trade Center blast.

  The Shocking New Evidence

  In January 2010, during interviews for a Playboy magazine article,31 I learned new details on the Shalabi killing that had never been publicly disclosed. That led the NYPD to reopen the case. The subject of my piece, “The Spy Who Came in for the Heat,” was Emad Salem, a remarkable former Egyptian Army major who became a naturalized U.S. citizen and succeeded in infiltrating the cell around the Blind Sheikh responsible for both the WTC bombing and the Day of Terror plot.*

  Salem was so skillful as an undercover operative that within weeks of contacting the cell members, he became Sheikh Omar’s personal bodyguard.

  Emad Salem and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman

  Then, after months undercover, Salem was effectively forced out of the cell by the newly appointed head of the JTTF, who insisted that he wear a wire—changing Salem’s initial deal with the FBI. That left the cell around the Blind Sheikh without a bomb maker, so they called in Ramzi Yousef. In the fall of 1992, working directly with Abouhalima, Salameh, and Ayyad, Yousef then built the 1,500-pound device, which he delivered to the Trade Center in a Ryder rental truck.32

  While I was researching the Playboy piece, Salem provided me with an audiotape he’d made of a phone conversation with his FBI control agent, John Anticev, after the bombing. In the recording Salem can be heard saying, “If we was continuing what we were doing, the bomb would never go off.” At that point Anticev says, “Absolutely. But don’t repeat that.”

  That recording is the first concrete admission by a JTTF agent that the FBI could have stopped the World Trade Center bombing.33

  At that point, in March 1993, even though he’d been vastly unappreciated by the management in the Bureau’s New York Office, Salem volunteered to go back undercover, this time wired up. As the government’s linchpin witness in the “Day of Terror” case, he spent more than thirty days on the stand. But his testimony led directly to the conviction of Sheikh Omar and nine others in 1995.34

  Solving the Shalabi Cold-Case Murder

  In the fall of 2009, after spending years in the Witness Protection Program, Salem contacted me and asked to meet in New York City. I was giving a lecture at New York University and Salem arranged to meet me afterward. We ended up talking for hours, and in the days ahead he gave me a series of lengthy interviews.

  During one session, Salem happened to comment that in the midst of an undercover conversation in the early 1990s, Hampton-El, the U.S. Black Muslim convicted in the “Day of Terror” plot, had told him that a .22 pistol was used to kill Shalabi. That detail had never been made public by the NYPD detectives, who interviewed a series of witnesses in 1991 but couldn’t produce enough evidence for charges to be filed.

  After some research, I learned that in 1993 the Feds had reopened the Shalabi case and leaked information that led to a series of articles in the New York Times. Those stories identified Hampton-El, Abouhalima, and Salameh as possible suspects.35 The U.S. attorney’s office for the SDNY even subpoenaed witnesses to a Shalabi grand jury, but for reasons unknown, the Feds dropped the
case in 1994; it stayed cold until the winter of 2010.36

  In mid-February of that year, I contacted the Brooklyn South homicide squad, which commenced a new investigation of the Shalabi murder.37 The lead investigator was James Moss, a veteran detective. He visited Salem in the state where he’d been living for years under an assumed identity. After finding him highly credible, Moss began searching for the forensic evidence from the bloody Shalabi crime scene.

  By late May, Moss discovered that this key evidence, once stored in the NYPD property clerk’s office, had been signed out by an investigator for the Joint Terrorism Task Force back in October 1993. I later learned through a source that the investigator who removed the evidence was none other than the late Detective Tommy Corrigan—the same JTTF investigator who had been present during the 1989 Calverton surveillance of Salameh and Hampton-El.38

  The Feds Produce a Series of Stunning Confessions

  In June, after Detective Moss hit a brick wall, I sent the first in a series of detailed e-mails to the Intelligence Division of the NYPD, asking them to contact the Bureau so that the forensic evidence seized by Corrigan might be returned. On June 30, 2010, apparently in response, the Feds produced a series of FBI 302 memos dating from 2004 to 2006. They shed extraordinary new light on the Shalabi and Kahane murders. Among the revelations in the more than twenty pages of FBI 302s was evidence that:

  • Shalabi was shot and stabbed by three al-Qaeda terrorists who were indicted in the original 1993 WTC bombing, including Nidal Ayyad and Mohammed Salameh.39

  • The third alleged killer, a twenty-five-year-old Jordanian cabdriver named Bilal Alkaisi, was not only identified as the leader of the Shalabi hit team but was also fingered as the second gunman in the Kahane murder—a fact corroborated by his former attorney.40