Deal With the Devil: The FBI's Secret Thirty-Year Relationship With a Mafia Killer

by Peter Lance

  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

  • 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 Butn
er, 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