I was never good at being no
type of scam artist. This is the first time in my
life I’m ever really trying to run a scam.
They got convicted on not what they were able to do but
what they were able to say. The question is, are they
willing to commit these acts? My mind can’t see that it’s
the feds that’s pulling the strings.
They gave who they thought to be an Al-Qaeda operative exactly
what he had asked for. They had no money. They had
no weapons. They weren’t even Islamic extremists.
(car door closes) What time is it?
6:48. I think he's just gonna be so
happy to be a free man. So happy to see his children.
Oh, man. Damn, boy...
(indistinct) 13 years ago, my face was
all over the news media. The FBI told me I was on "Larry
King Live" the day I was arrested.
All right, let me get one more hug from everybody.
Now, I'm just the average person walking down the street.
♪ ♪ This what took place
because of bad choices of words that he made.
And that's all he ever did was say... speak, talk.
Nonsense. Batiste intended to recruit
and supervise individuals to organize and train for a mission
of war against the United States.
Narseal, he had good intentions, but he is also a
good conman. And when the two run afoul,
this is what you get... mayhem. Federal authorities described
the group as radical Black Muslims.
Their goal was simple: to commit attacks against America.
Just like the gang that couldn't shoot straight, they
got convicted on not what they were able to do, but what they
were able to say. Six to eight people are now
in federal custody after allegedly plotting to attack
well-known U.S. cities. The federal government is
calling this bust a major victory on the domestic front in
this shadowy war. Next to being a pedophile, a
terrorist is the next-worst thing you can be.
Narseal Batiste claimed his soldiers would, quote, "Kill all
the devils we can." An FBI informant promised
them $50,000 if they pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda.
Federal Bureau of Investigation, they invented
the players, they invented the theme, they invented how it was
gonna go down... they, they wrote this script.
They wrote this script. They conducted surveillance,
they conspired to murder countless Americans through
attacks that would be in their words "just as good or
greater than 9/11." It can be just as good or
greater than 9/11. This is not the case that
they want America to see. There are, there are some
serious terrorists out there that America needs to be
concentrating on. This right here was just a...
It was almost like a, "Let's do a dry run.
If we can convict somebody as lazy and sorry as this crew was,
then we can convict anybody." ♪ ♪
(engine running) ♪ ♪
In 2005, I was the acting supervisory special agent with
the FBI in Miami. The domestic Al-Qaeda squad.
I was born in the Bronx, my brother and I.
Both my parents became addicted to heroin.
Which wasn't very unusual for that period in American history.
My father had been arrested a few times.
He was involved in a credit card ring.
Another time, he was arrested for, uh, narcotics.
Coming from that experience, you're always looking for an
angle because everybody has a hustle.
♪ ♪ So I graduate high school.
How, I don't know, but I did. Spent nine years in the
military, went to school at night, and then I put in an
application with the FBI. FBI calls nine months later and
I end up at Quantico. (indistinct chatter)
Got out in '92, ended up in Miami, and you wake up and ten
years have gone by. And then 9/11 happens.
On September 10, if we would have saw a movie on the
events that happened on September 11, we all would have
left that movie theater and said, "That is a phenomenal
movie, but it could never happen in the United States."
And on September 11, it did. And what did they use?
They didn't use bombs or weapons, they used box cutters
and, and complacency. We got sucker-punched.
On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an
act of war against our country. The evidence we have gathered
all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist
organizations known as Al-Qaeda. (applause)
Director Robert Mueller had been the director of the FBI for
one week prior to 9/11. He went to brief President Bush.
Within a minute of telling the president, vice president, and
others, uh, about the 19 hijackers that we'd already
learned about and everything, President Bush cut him off and
said, "That's all well and, and good, Mr. Director, but I wanna
know what the FBI is doing to prevent the next attack."
Director Mueller's job was then to take that mission, to take
the FBI from that reactive crime-solving agency to a
preventative national security agency.
Mr. Pistole, with respect to preventing 9/11, obviously, you
get a failing grade. So, the concern within the
FBI immediately after 9/11 is that there were other either
sleeper cells or there were other terrorist operatives in
the U.S. And who else did they have
positioned to commit a second attack?
And what, how that attack might manifest itself.
We didn't know. Because there was a gap, uh, in
the intelligence about what attacks might be taking place.
We realized, there are huge gaps that we didn't know the
answers to. One of the, the good things
about the FBI's history was the ability to identify and develop
cooperating witnesses and informants.
So, in the decade after 9/11, let's say, there was a great
focus on developing human sources of information about
attacks, potential attacks. We would get a tremendous
amount of intelligence in the form of leads.
Now, it's post-9/11, so each one of these has to be shaken out.
One of my colleagues comes in and he says, "Look, I have some
information, um, from an informant that there's a group
of guys in Miami, in, in Liberty City, that are conducting
military training, that are interested in overthrowing the
U.S. government, um, and that wanna meet Al-Qaeda."
♪ ♪ This was, you know, like a
unicorn. How does Al-Qaeda pop up in
Liberty City? (indistinct chatter)
Some areas were high drug- trafficking areas, and there
were shoot-outs all the time. The group were part of this
hybrid religious-militant organization.
They do military-type training, they do not believe in the laws
of the United States. They were basically
anti-government. So at this point, we're
assessing the veracity of the informant's information.
The person he was referring to was Narseal Batiste.
(camera shutter clicking) Batiste was the leader.
We're still trying to determine what his motive is.
What is he really up to? (shutter clicks)
I wanted to be an actor. It was interesting to see myself
intrigue people over a character.
I went to modeling school. I had a big interest in
modeling and in acting at the time.
I always loved martial arts. That's just come from watching
Shaolin Temple, kung fu master movies, you know?
Narseal was the baby, he was the last one.
My mother had just had Narseal. She came home from the hospital
and put him in my bed and told me it was my baby.
That she don't change diapers and she don't fix bottle milks.
And for me to take care of him. My mom and dad, they did
Baptist preaching. They was ordained Baptists.
At that time, my parents were very wealthy from my dad's
construction company. My dad was doing government jobs
like building post offices, colleges, prisons.
So, he really blew up in his construction business.
What changed in Narseal's life, he met this man that wore these
diapers on his head and carried a cane, and his name was
G-G-G something 'thena. He was telling me Narseal's the
33-something of the 76-something, that he's Jesus.
I said, "No, my brother is not Jesus."
Then the next thing I know, my brother start changing.
He start wearing diapers on his head and carrying a staff.
Well, I created my own style of religion.
You know what I mean? My, my robes and what I wore was
very unique. Nobody else on the street wore
what I wore. My style had something like, um,
much more of a martial arts- Egyptian type of mixture
outfit. I wore a lot of velvets and
Indian cotton. Sage rope.
A staff in my hand or a rod. That's what I looked like.
An ancient type of holy man, looked like I stepped out of the
Bible. Naz, beautiful brother.
Beautiful brother. You see, like, he fell out of
Heaven. You know, he had that innocent
quality to him. And we choose...
(translating to Haitian Creole)
To worship almighty God... (translating)
On this day... (translating)
You are trusting in God. (translating)
I've come here to tell you today.
I was born in the United States, but my mom and dad from
Haiti. 17, 18, I got baptized.
And when I got baptized, I was feeling it, you know.
It was just something on me, I was feeling it.
And by that time in my life, I knew things wasn't fair.
And have power and authority...
When we talk about leaders and who we look up to, you
know, we looked up to Naz. 'Cause Naz knew the Bible, he
spoke it, and he really was about it.
As a prophet of God. He grew up, you know, real
close to God. So, we always was searching.
So, when he smiled, you know, it was something that he had that
was almost innocent. You know, he ain't, he wasn't
spoil, spoiled like the rest of us.
♪ ♪ Naz was perfect.
There was no street in him at all.
I was, like, 19, 18. I was the youngest one out of
everybody, and I, I was still going to night school trying to
graduate... a high school diploma.
Naz was a Black activist. Wanting to help out the
community. (shutter clicks)
That's what you got off the top. (shutter clicks)
He was really... (shutter clicks)
savvy when it came to the Bible.
Decoding it or making the Bible in, in laymen's term, making it
so, the point where I could understand it.
He asked me to read a passage or something, he realized I
couldn't read. And then he was, like, "Okay,
it's all right, you can stop right there," and...
Pulled me to the side later, he was, like, "Um, how
old are you?" I was, like, "I'm, like, I'm
19." He's, like, "You really should
work on that, learning how to read."
And I was, like, "Yeah, I know." He's, like, "If you want, I
could help you sometimes." And I said, "Okay, cool."
(shutter clicks) I done introduced Naz to Naudy.
I done introduced Naz to my brother.
Pat knew Sunny. Sunny brought Levi.
Eventually, they did become my followers, they joined the
temple, and they agreed to give me the, um, the head position
as the, uh, the high priest of the temple.
The actual temple was right across the street from a
projects that they call the Pork and Beans projects.
There's a lot of gun selling, drug dealing, and a lot of
violence that goes on. And, um, drive-by shootings.
So we rent the warehouse. But it was supposed to be a
temple. A temple.
We had Bibles, we had Quran, we had certain books, the Hare
Krishna, we had certain books, 'cause...
It was, everybody was welcome to our table... that was the
whole one thing about why we called it the temple.
Because what's in a temple, is where you actually get in your
temple and pray. We wasn't Muslims.
But we had to understand the religions of the world and how
they related to the people that we going to talk to.
So, 99%, we studied the Bible. The temple was called Moorish
Science Temple of America and Universal Divine Saviors.
It sounded cool. Naz said, "The whole reason I
came to Miami was to make all of you guys Moorish, Moorish
Americans." I'm, like, "Moorish Americans?"
You may not have heard of the Moorish Nationals.
It comes from a Black religious group that's been around for
nearly a century. Most of its members obey the
law, but not everyone. This man was arrested by
police in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
But his wife claims the arrest was illegal because he is a
member of the Moorish Nation. He has diplomatic immunity.
Why are y'all doing this? He was telling me, um, the
Moorish Science Temple is, like, indigenous people to
America and we have sovereign rights.
And I didn't understand what none of that (bleep) was.
I was, like, "What the (bleep) is sovereign rights?"
What snatch you up is when they tell you you didn't
come over here just on no slave ship.
And the Moorish Science Temple, it mixed Christianity, Judaism,
and Islamism all in one. They are geared to help the
Black community. So we sitting down just
building on the Bible and talking about making a great
change, you know, and can we do it, can we actually, you
know, change not just our condition, but the condition of
our moms and dads and cousins and community?
You know, you can't come into the community if you ain't no
strong man. So, we came across, like, "Yo,
we are soldiers." You know, "We soldiers for God."
♪ ♪ They had uniforms that they
would wear, paramilitary uniforms.
Khaki-type shirt and they would wear the same type of pants.
This is the Moorish star, you know, for the religion.
And then of course, them living in America, they have the
American flag. And what was so ironic about
this whole thing is that the government tried to paint them
as that they were un-American. You know, we brought in
experts to tell us, "Hey, what...
Which, uh, what flavor of Kool-Aid is this, 'cause we
haven't seen this before?" Something is not making sense.
You had a group of guys that were in Liberty City that
wanted to meet somebody from Al-Qaeda.
Everything had to be followed up.
Because some of the things that fell through the gap that
allowed 9/11 to happen, we could not allow for anything
like that to fall through a gap again.
I had never heard of the informant, Abbas Al-Saidi.
Abbas had worked at a convenience store, you know,
in a medium-to low-income neighborhood.
He started out as a snitch initially for drugs.
New York City has its own intelligence unit, which was
focused on terrorism after 9/11. They found this young guy from
Yemen who's pretty street-smart to be somebody that they could
use in their investigation in New York.
At some point in time, there became a threat that they
considered to be a threat against him.
They encouraged him to move out of New York City.
And, and ultimately, he, he moved down to Miami.
I was 18 years old at this time, going on 19.
I just kind of was in love with him and did what he... told
me to do. And I trusted him.
And that was one of my biggest mistakes.
We had three dollars between the both of us and we got into
a really physical argument. He beats the crap out of
Stefanie one day. Uh, ends up in jail.
I had bite marks on my neck, bruises on my face.
Even though it was his first domestic violence, he went to
jail for a couple of months. He kept calling the connections
that he had in New York. He reaches out to the
lieutenant in New York, "Hey, can you help me out, I'm in
jail," yadda yadda, tells him the story.
The guy says, "Look, I can maybe, you know, reach out to
the FBI and see if they might have an interest," and an
agent comes and visits him in jail.
He told me that when he came out of jail, that the FBI was
waiting there to go to work. He found the brothers and that's
all he needed to do the job. I used to go to the corner
store and see him all the time. And he was extra-friendly.
He would try to act Black so much.
Smoking weed in the (bleep) store, blasting Tupac.
And I'm, like, damn. I was, like, this dude is wild.
He was, like, "What's up?" I was, like, "Man, what's up?"
I used to go over to the store all the time buying 'gars and
(bleep) to smoke. The weed that he had, the
marijuana he had, was great substance and it was the kind of
substance that I really enjoyed, so my friend that worked there
would get it for me. One day he see me with Naz,
he, like, "Oh, you know the brother!"
And he switched it up, now he's, like, all Muslim and he's, like,
"Yes, brother"... he's not even using it, he's not smoking, he's
not using the N word, he's not cussing, he's all Muslim now.
(laughs): He's a Muslim now. I'm, like, "What happened?"
He seemed very religious but he seemed very street.
Like, street hustler. So, that's why I related to him
in a sense, because he had game, he had a street vibe.
One day, his cousin comes down, he, like, "Man, y'all
don't wanna mess with Abbas, man," and then, we couldn't get
it, 'cause we ain't thinking about no FBI, no police, or...
He, like, "Man, y'all don't wanna mess with him, man, he
dirty." I remember him saying, "Abbas
is working with the police." Now, I was, like, "What?"
He said Abbas was involved in setting people up with law
enforcement. And that if he ever gets a
chance to, he'll fabricate a story on me.
That's where we met him. The government said that
when I met Abbas, I went into his store asking him, "Can you
hook me up with Osama bin Laden or any terrorist guy?"
That's what they were saying. And...
Is that true? No, it never happened.
What the informant initially said: "I met a guy who has a
group. They wanna overthrow the United
States, they wanna meet an Al-Qaeda operative, and they
wanna align themselves with Al-Qaeda."
One of the critical capabilities that a terrorist organization
such as Al-Qaeda needs is resources here in the States.
If they could acquire the capability of a U.S. citizen or
a group of U.S. citizens that are completely off the radar,
well, that's, that's a pretty formidable threat.
So, at the time, I'm thinking maybe something was
miscommunicated, misunderstood. You know, one of the ways we
resolve that is reconstitute the conversation and capture it on
audio. (tape recorder starts)
This is Special Agent John P. Stewart with the Federal Bureau
of Investigation, Miami Division.
Today's date, October 3, 2005. The time, 2:45 p.m.
(phone calling out) (tape recorder stops)
Hm. It was just one of the worst,
I guess you could say, things that could have ever happened
to us in our life. Because this cry from this
man for Narseal to help him turned out actually to be
what actually set everything for us in turmoil.
The turning point between me and Abbas is when I went to the
store, I seen ICE there. Immigration Custom Enforcement.
Abbas was rampaging back and forth in the store, "Brother,
um, I'm in a lot of trouble right now, they, they're
trying to deport me." Of course, being the man that
Narseal is, he would want to help at any given opportunity.
Narseal had told him, "If you need any help, reach out to us."
And of course, he did. (sighs): And then from there
started the nightmare. (tape recorder starts)
(phone calling out) How you doing, brother?
Eid Mubarak. Just working like crazy.
What time, what time exactly are you gonna be at the temple?
Uh, I can't really say right now, 'cause I got so much work
ahead of me today. (tape recorder stops)
The phone calls of him calling me just, just increased.
Instead of being at, like, every two weeks, he'll call me, see
how I'm doing, it was, like, every day.
(tape recorder starts) (phone calling out)
Um, I don't know, if you want me to come over or if you wanna
come over, I'm, I'm, I'm free right now.
They just called me on a job and I have to go look at a job
at the airport, so I'm gonna be leaving in about an hour.
He's saying he needs to meet me right away.
(tape recorder stops) And what was your response?
Uh, as soon as I get a chance to, 'cause I was very busy with
work. With the construction company.
(phone calling out) (voicemail beeps softly)
Azteca Stucco & Masonry. I loved the name Azteca because
of the Aztec, um... Ancient Indians were, uh,
master builders, so I adopted that.
(camera shutter clicking) Pat was in the construction
field. Sunny was in the construction
field. Naz was a truck driver.
I was doing security and a little side hustle.
And we needed to make money. Pat was, like, "I have an idea."
We gonna team up and, you know, let's put a small
construction company together. We got the skills, we got the
determination, we got a willingness, and we got...
There's the need. (shutter clicks)
I'm coming home, dead tired, and man, I was happy.
I was, like, "Man, I'm doing something, I'm doing something.
You know, change is coming." (shutter clicking)
It was the first time in my life I was working towards my own
business. My own business.
(shutter clicks) I dived all in, I had all
my cards in the construction game.
Sacrificed weeks without even getting paid, wake up... early,
and go to sleep late. And there's no money on the
table... I'm not getting paid. We had several instances
where we were not getting paid, plus the investment we already
had made into, uh, remodeling the temple.
So we was at a financial... Just rough.
The biggest mistake he was consistently making was using
other job money to cover other job because he underestimated
this job. The number-one rule in
construction: every job pay itself.
You don't use money from another job to cover bills in another
job... that's bad business. I just knew it became very
overwhelming for him. Oftentimes he would just not
sleep. Everybody wanted a, a better
way of living, so he felt the pressure of all these families
on him. (shutter clicks)
Test. This is Balan, today's date is
11-21-2005. Time is 1:38 p.m.
This recording includes A.K.A. Brother Naz.
(phone calling out) Hi.
As-salaam alaykum. Yeah?
How you doing, akhi, what's going on?
Hey, what's up, Ab? Alhamdulillah, alhamdulillah,
you okay, akhi? Yeah, (inaudible), hanging in
there. I hear you, brother.
I've been working, but I'm gonna get off early today.
I'll probably be at the temple around 7:00.
Okay, so you want me to meet you at the temple at 7:00, or do
you wanna come over to the, to the, um, to the house?
Uh... I mean, I'm in my house.
It's, it's more safe, you know? Over here, it's, it's quiet.
Okay, I'll, I'll be there around 7:00, then.
All right, brother, thank you very much, man.
(phone disconnects) Abbas kept begging and
begging, begging, he just kept promising, "You just don't
realize the opportunity that I can have for you."
You know, "We're gonna do something really, really, really
great. Together, financially."
"I could really help you guys, if you just trust me just a
little bit, just to come by and talk."
So it wasn't, "Let's see how we can build a mousetrap, put
a big piece of cheese on there." Listen, I don't even know if
this is a mouse. And if it is a mouse, I don't
even know if this mouse wants any cheese.
So... We looked at Batiste and said
he doesn't look like, you know, I don't know, he's...
He's saying these things that a mouse would say, but let's give
him another shot. And then we had nowhere else
to go but to put the piece of cheese on the trap.
When you're sending an informant into a meeting, you're not
giving them a script. You're giving them an outline,
with a, with some objectives to achieve.
Revisit this conversation. Let Batiste explain in his own
words what it is that he was asking Abbas for assistance in.
The outline for that was in the form of Abbas telling Narseal
Batiste, "Remember you told me you wanted to meet an Al-Qaeda
guy. Um, well, I, I got the guy."
Abbas has a friend of his that he wants me to meet who's
a financial guy, a rich guy, this, that, and the other.
And that he would help back us at whatever we needed.
But we need to follow his direction in this.
Okay, so he wants us to make sure that we're really good
Muslims. He's, like, "Yeah, you gotta be
really good, good Muslim men. And no Christianity, so, so go
buy some Qurans." I'm, like, "Uh-huh."
Abbas told Naz he has a uncle coming down who's a
philanthropist. And he love people who's helping
the community. That's what Abbas must have
repeated a thousand times: "Man, my uncle like to help people
who help people. Don't worry about nothing.
He's... that's what he do." "I'm gonna talk to my uncle.
My uncle going to help you. You know, he gonna get some
money and we all gonna, you know, we're all gonna make
some money." We wanted the money, we
wanted the funds, 'cause we... We were (bleep) up bad.
Nobody had the knowledge of how to run a business.
So we was (bleep) up what we was doing.
This is Balan, the date is 11-21-2005, the time is 7:58
p.m. (phone calling out)
Akhi! Akhi, how you doing, man?
That's Brother Naz, huh? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'm waiting for you, man. How you doing, what's going on?
Rock on, brother, rock on! All right, all right, I just
don't wanna be missing anything, because I'm praying alone and I
don't like it, man, I'm waiting for you for isha.
Oh, inshallah, we're gonna be there in two or three minutes.
Okay, inshallah, akhi. Inshallah, man, salaam
alaykum. Mashallah.
(phone disconnects) The time is 7:59 p.m.
This recording is ended. (tape recorder stops)
(dog barking, crickets chirping) (knock at door)
(indistinct chatter) When we get there, we're
still in our work clothes 'cause we just left a job.
Me and Patrick Abraham. (indistinct chatter)
We were just kind of, like, clowning around.
(indistinct chatter) Just laughing and talking
about the situation that Abbas was, was talking to us about.
Our intention from the beginning was to put this to
bed. He wants to meet Al-Qaeda?
Okay, tell him you got a guy, see what he says.
The expected response would be, "Well, what are you, what are
you, what are you talking about? I, I never... I don't
remember ever saying that." He could have said, "Hey,
listen, I, I was a little out of my lane, I was off my meds,
and I don't know what you're talking about."
And then we would have happily have closed that investigation,
because it wasn't like we were looking for work.
I thought Abbas was an avenue to relinquish my financial
difficulty. If I can just get the money, I
can pay these immediate bills. That was the only thing that
kept driving me: that if I get that one handful of money, then
it's over with. I had no belief into, um,
fighting any jihad, holy war, or anything that's going on in
the Middle East. And even though it was against
my morals and values, I felt like if I could go through it
and just get the money, then all of that would be washed away.
"Well, Tony, we got the tape."
"Okay, so what are we doing?" "Well, he asked him, 'Hey, you
remember when you wanted to meet the...?', and he said,
'Yeah.'" "So what, what are we doing
now?" "Okay, well, you, you're gonna
have to put somebody that's gonna pretend to be Al-Qaeda
in front of him." My name is Elie Assaad,
former undercover operative for United State, uh, government.
We identified an informant that had been previously used in
another FBI investigation in Miami.
So, they needed to, to get somebody else, a little bit
stronger, a little bit more forceful, so they bring in the
closer. The closer is, is, uh, Elie
Assaad. And Elie Assaad was a
professional informant. He used to refer to himself to
his friends as Tony Montana from the, uh, "Scarface," you
know, the, the evil character. Are we ready?
You ready? Hold on, one second.
Sure, okay. When we initially got the
information, we're looking at this, and we're, like, "Do we
think that these guys really wanna meet somebody from
Al-Qaeda?" You know, common sense sort of
suggested probably not, but let's see where it goes.
And so we decided on using him because we did not expect for it
to go beyond that first meeting. I'm good, I never lost a
case. I never lost a case all these
years... even sometimes, uh, when they have already on,
ongoing cases, where they feel they gonna lose it, and they
bring me to, uh, jump in and put it back on track.
Abbas is talking about Elie Assaad, but he's using his name
as "Uncle." Yeah, that's, that's his name.
Elie Assaad. No good mother(bleep).
We rented a hotel room. The Hilton, Downtown Miami.
Again, we set up surveillance so we could capture the meeting in
video and audio. I'm in a room close by, where we
can monitor the meeting. We also have a surveillance unit
outside of the hotel. Abbas continued to call us
and call us until Elie Assaad came and he called me on that
day to go meet him. He initially promised me, like,
around 20 grand or whatever. He said, "I'll have it for
you. I just need you to meet him ."
The surveillance team says, "You're not going to believe
this, but your subject is walking down Biscayne Boulevard
in a white robe and a cane that's six feet tall, looking
like Moses." I got on the radio and I said,
"Are you sure it's our subject?" And they're, like, "It's, it's
your guy." I look at our team in the room
and I'm, like, "What, what's going on?"
Room 612, I knocked on the door.
Assaad opened up the door and he says, "Come on in, brother,
let's talk." I figured I could be slick
enough to say what I had to say in there and just get that
money and break off. Batiste doesn't blink.
He could have said, "Listen, I was just joking, I'm going to a
Halloween party..." And fine.
Elie Assaad. He had somewhat of an ego
if you will. I think he sort of felt he
needed to guide this conversation more affirmatively,
and at times I think he, he may overdo it.
I was never good at being no type of scam artist.
This is, this is the first time in my life I'm ever really
trying to run a scam. And he was, like, "All
right, so what do you need?" I knew that I had to make
something up right then and there.
Course, I was not prepared for any kind of list, I didn't bring
any kind of list, because this was just something I was just
brainstorming on. So I wrote a whole bunch of
crazy things down on the list. I needed knee-high boots, things
that didn't make sense. Yes, I put guns on there.
I couldn't name them, he kept asking me the name for them.
I didn't know any name of guns, 'cause I never owned a gun.
The list that he took he tore up several times, and
eventually, there was a list that was made.
And he was, like, "I'll go back and talk to Abbas about
everything and we'll work on getting the money to you."
I left the room. I felt a lot of fear.
I felt like a big cavity was inside my chest.
Empty. We're... we're in the room and
we're, like, "Okay, well, what happens now?"
So, we went back to the, uh, to the bullpen, and sat down and
says, "Okay, guys, it's, let's whiteboard this.
What are, what are we gonna do?" Okay? We could go knock on
Batiste's door and say, "Hey, listen, we...
You met with somebody who said they were with Al-Qaeda.
Now, how serious are you? 'Cause if you're not, okay,
you need to knock it off." They could just... go off and
not do anything for another year, or two years, or three
years. There aren't enough resources to
commit to that type of, you know, monitoring.
So, we wanted to find out, um, how committed Batiste was to
what he had told Elie Assaad. This whole thing was way
beyond me. The rhetoric and the talk and
the relationship with Abbas just went... way out of control.
My hustle wasn't even talking about terrorists at the very
beginning. I was slowly wielded into that
with Abbas. He really set these guys up.
There's really no other way for me to put it.
Abbas saw, from working in the store, that these men didn't
have a lot of money. And he also played on that,
that they were poor. They just kept getting pushed
forward and forward and forward by Abbas.
And Abbas is putting all these ideas in their head.
It was like a big joke to him at home, it was...
All he could do was laugh about it, it...
He thought it was hilarious. He was, like, "I can't believe
they think I'm really Al-Qaeda." It didn't matter if that's how
he was gonna get his money, if that's how the FBI was gonna pay
him. In the informant world, are
they paid? Of course they're paid.
They got paid expenses. It wasn't, like, "Hey, listen,
if you get a conviction, you're gonna get a hundred, a hundred
thousand dollars." That's not how we operate.
I finally get a call from Abbas telling me, "Look, um, Assaad
definitely wants to meet with you... he's got the money, you
just have to pick him up." He told me that, "If you gonna
get the money, you gotta make it sound for real.
Talk big, like you gonna blow something up."
He said, "If you say that, they're gonna come through."
I was high off marijuana one time when we was riding in the
back seat of a car, and he whispered over to me, says, "You
got anything in mind you could say big?
Say, you're from Chicago, you should be able to come up with
something." And I thought in my mind, "Well,
the Sears Tower, I guess I'll blow that up, how does that
sound?" And he cracked up laughing and
he said, "That would be great." That was the basic
motivation of it, was, the whole thing was about who could scam
who out of the money. Did you think that that could
go wrong for you? Yes.
Did I linger on that thought? No.
He's gonna give you money. What the (bleep) you think the
money is for? Terrorism.
He wants you to do an act, just like a, uh, murder for hire.
What's present in our mind is, "When you give it to me, I'm not
killing nobody. This is mine, (bleep) you.
What you gonna do? 'Cause if you really that
powerful, you would have had your own crew right here.
You ain't (bleep). You just a rich mother(bleep)
that is gonna give the money to us and then you gonna
disappear." Whoa, man, it's, like,
terrorism. You know, it never popped in
our mind like, "Yo, this is something serious."
It's like these two (bleep) fake guys playing some (bleep)-damned
game. Batiste fighting for control
over some damn donations, and it was... it all made me sick.
I wanna prove these guys didn't wanna do this.
I wanna prove that this conversation that the informant
may have misquoted didn't happen.
And this is what it is. But that's not what happened.
Every time I thought we were gonna get off the highway, we
hit another mile marker. Yeah, he left yesterday.
(exhales) He left yesterday, so...
I was taking a lot of marijuana substance.
At least an ounce every two days, and it had me living in a
world of fear. And fear was pulling all of this
into a detrimental path with myself.
As far as trusting my own, uh, judgment of what's right and
wrong, in terms of the scam, of going further or not.
Whenever I, I, you know, my attention fell on him, it's
like, "Yeah, he talking, talking crazy.
You know, doing all of that just to get the, convince the guy
to get you some money." I was just trying to get into
Assaad's head, you know, say what would make him happy.
'Cause he kept looking at me like, you know, "I need more.
Say something more." This guy just make a
crazy-ass statement and then, less than ten second later, he's
in a basketball game. The TV faced us.
So, a lot of time, you see me there, I'm, I'm looking, I'm
watching the game. I wasn't feeling good about
what I was saying. But at the time, I felt like I
had to, to make up this story one more time for this guy.
So, I was just constantly just flipping through different
pictures in my mind that I seen on the media.
I grabbed that from just end of world type of movies.
'Cause a lot of that was going on at the time.
Tidal waves type of movies. (clapping)
I'm not gonna do anything. I'm just talking a whole bunch
of crap here. And I'm high.
If Batiste is having these conversations with somebody he
believes is from Al-Qaeda, you know, Al-Qaeda would say, "Okay,
maybe, maybe we should target the Sears Tower.
And, and, and by the way, you think we should, as the
survivors run out, shoot them? We didn't even think of that.
Write that down." (laughs)
Dude. You, you, you really have to do
all of that? Did you have to really, doing
all that back and forth with the guy?
"Yeah, he, he gonna, you know, I'm gonna get the money.
I'm gonna get the money." All right, whatever, man.
I was sick of it. Matter of fact, I remember,
uh, when I went home, I got sick somehow or another, I was
doing a lot of vomiting. It's, like, "Okay, let's say
he is crazy. That's a dangerous dialogue."
We never expected, again, to get to where we ended up, because we
thought at some point, he would say, "Look, this is what I'm...
This is all a charade." Director Mueller was being
briefed daily. And we knew that this was
included in his presidential briefs.
That brief is, "Look, there's a group of kids in Miami-Dade that
formed an organization, that want to align themselves with
Al-Qaeda to start a war in the United States."
The prosecutors wanted more overt acts.
So anytime there's a conspiracy involved, you have to have overt
acts in furtherance of that conspiracy.
Anything that a prosecutor could use as evidence to convince a
judge or jury that these people were serious.
A conversation is an act. So, uh, you don't need to pick
up a gun or, or let off a bomb or make a bomb for it to be an
overt act. I think the idea came from the
FBI through C.I.A., and the idea was to have some sort of formal
allegiance, some pledge to Al-Qaeda, to see if they went
forward with it. The idea was introduced to
further test their commitment to their interest in aligning with
Al-Qaeda by saying, "Well, look, you have to take an oath of
loyalty." ♪ ♪
Assaad came by the temple. He says, "The reason why I hold
back the money from you is because you don't have a
commitment." I said, "Well, what do you
mean?" He says, "We gotta have some
type of commitment between us." And he didn't call it an oath or
any, uh, swearing allegiance to any organization or anything.
He says, "Just a commitment." So he says, "Well, we have to
meet and we have to discuss this commitment some more and
then we can proceed further." I drove to his location and he
got in the car and he pulled out this piece of paper and he says,
"This is the commitment or the oath that I need you to read."
Listen, if, if you're not a hundred percent on board with
this, here's your, here's your chance to get out.
Here's your chance to get out. And so eventually, I read it.
I felt like it was stupid. I didn't feel like it was a real
Al-Qaeda oath. Um, usually, when somebody
wants you to swear allegiance to a dangerous organization, it's
gonna be something, some type of dramatic thing... they ain't
gonna actually read from no piece of paper.
They're gonna probably, you know, do something crazy to you
or have you do something crazy. Were you not worried that
this could all catch up with you very quickly?
Of course I was worried. And yet...
Yet I thought I could still, uh, make this deal go through.
The direction that was given was, if, if Batiste takes the
oath, then you tell him that all of the members of his
organization have to take the oath.
So, this was already pre-planned.
I felt like I was getting deeper into a trap.
That I might not be able to get myself out of this trap if I
play this game even further. ♪ ♪
The approach that we took was to create a platform to capture
conversations with the group. That particular area where their
warehouse was was incredibly difficult to surveil.
It was a high drug trafficking area.
So, we looked at telling Batiste, "Hey, listen, one of
the things we can do is, we could get you a better training
facility." ♪ ♪
The idea came up, renting a warehouse, pre-wiring it, so we
could capture audio and video. Then take that warehouse and
identify three other warehouses, and tell Batiste, "Hey, listen,
let's go, look at some warehouses."
I was told by Assaad, "I got a warehouse.
And we need to go look at one, you can pick out any one, and
we'll just give it to you. And that'll be a part of the
financial help that we'll give you."
I mean, this isn't rocket science.
We got a really nice warehouse. It's a Bentley of warehouses,
and then two other warehouses that, you know, you wouldn't
even wanna, you know, burn for insurance money.
The question is posed to Batiste, "Which warehouse do you
want?" We picked the one the FBI
wanted us to pick. How, how much control is...
That's why I'm tripping. The one we pick, we pick, is the
one they had set up that they wanted us to pick so they'll...
This is how so much it was over our head... they knew how to
make us pick what they wanted us to pick.
There was a boat in there. There was a van in there.
They both had keys, both had deeds in them.
It was all ours. There was a, a refrigerator
filled with fish and all type of seafood.
Like, ten pounds of shrimp. I was, like, "Wow.
Somebody just bought this. It was fresh."
And we flipped the switch. We got a Title III wiretap
intercept. Okay, let's see what happens.
It was huge. You know, so we had places for
bunks, places to work out, places to store our equipment.
It was an office in the front. So even for us, it was, like,
whoa, this would be a step up. (laughing)
Did you talk to the brothers about this?
Uh, in part. In part.
Do you feel you were being honest with the brothers at this
point? In terms of holding back
information? Yeah.
Yeah, I held back information.
Why? Uh, I felt like they would
have judged the situation to be not worth it.
And we could lose out on an opportunity that we've already
worked ourselves into. ♪ ♪
Naz was telling us already
that, "Don't worry about what this guy is saying.
It's just all bull(bleep)." 'Cause before then, we came from
a construction site. Before we went in here that day,
we came off of doing a job. I didn't give a (bleep) what
he was. Really?
I really didn't, that's what I'm trying to get you to, I
don't give a (bleep). We grew up from... nothing.
We grew up from watching people that we love die, get shot in
the street. We didn't grow up where
everybody talked their way out of trouble.
We grew up, everybody got killed or got sent to jail.
So it's, like, our way of life was if he didn't...
If we didn't see him display this type of violence, then
he's not on it. He's not, he's just talking.
And he's full of (bleep). ♪ ♪
The scenario was: Batiste
would bring them in and each one would have to take the oath.
Not as a group. Again, the reason for that is,
maybe somebody is in that group, and they're not saying anything,
but they're, like, "I..." You know, "I, I draw the line
here." I told them that he had some
silly commitment that he was asking us to read, but don't
take it serious. Batiste already spoke to us,
that's, no matter what's going on, he's just trying to get some
money, to just, don't say nothing and just back him up.
Okay. And I can't really tell you
detail of how it transferred to the whole oath thing.
I just know it happened. 'Cause during this whole time,
I'm getting high like a mother(bleep).
When he says that, I looked towards Batiste, I was, like,
"Hey, uh, Batiste, is this cool, or this, this all right, man?"
We, like, gritting our teeth and we, like, we put our hands
up. You know, we backing up our man.
That's crazy, man. Meanwhile, I was in the
background just giving the brothers the eye wink for
assurance, like, this is just... This ain't real, it's just a
game. (indistinct).
Okay. We barely had time to even
think, and who gives oaths to Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda?
That (bleep) is for the movies. This is what we see on TV.
It's not... even if it was real, it wasn't real.
'Cause it doesn't happen where we come from.
Once everyone took the oath, Elie Assaad was instructed to
introduce a plot by Al-Qaeda to blow up five FBI offices, Miami
being one of them. And that Al-Qaeda would like
some assistance in doing reconnaissance and surveillance
and other things. And then provide a video camera.
Even though it didn't make sense to me, I was more focused on...
Batiste. That moment, I felt betrayed.
I felt betrayed. And, and honestly, that was
the one time I should not have hold my composure, because that
time, I really wanted to punch him in the face.
I'm thinking, this, this straight bullcrap.
This straight bullcrap. I felt really like Batiste
crossed the line. So, after everything finished
happening, I took my wife, my kids, I took my kids out of
school, rented a rental car, and left.
That soiled us to a point where...
I don't know if we, we would have, we was able to come back
from that, that night, 'cause we started to lose respect for,
you know, not just ourselves, but for Batiste and for what we
was doing and... It's, it was, it was ugly.
It was ugly. They were very disappointed
in themselves, as well as disappointed in me.
That all this had to happen from just one single thought of, what
about if we can scam money out of these people?
It was just a nasty deal, a nasty scam, that nobody really
liked. ♪ ♪
Assaad had rented a van for us. 'Cause I told him I didn't have
any transportation or anything. I figured that if I just ride
around with a camera in my hand and then say it's all I'm gonna
do, that would satisfy as far as the end of my hustle and my
scam. ♪ ♪
Batiste, he, like, "Man, these pictures right here, you
can get these pictures online, you know, we gonna just give it
to him, and this is the last bit we have to ever do, to deal with
this guy. You know? This is it.
It's over." Assaad said, "You do this one
more project for me, take the picture, I'll give you the
money." It was $50,000, too.
Do you know why he wanted pictures of those buildings?
Oh, yeah, he wanted to blow them up, oh, yeah.
That was no secret. Did that bother you?
No and yeah, because... I didn't believe it.
♪ ♪
You know, I'm not scared as thinking there's a real
terrorist group, really wants some pictures of federal
buildings. You know, I'm not scared of
that, 'cause this guy is not no (bleep) terrorist.
Assaad. You know, I was trying to put
him together... why is he doing this?
My mind can't see that it's the Feds that's pulling the strings.
I can't imagine, you know, a government agency put this
together. ♪ ♪
They take footage of the U.S. attorney's office in Miami.
And I believe they took footage of the Miami Police Department.
We had only asked for reconnaissance on the FBI
office. Um, and then they provided that,
that video footage to, to Assaad.
They could have gone to Walmart and took a picture of
the back. So, they could have done a
number of things, even at that point in the investigation, but
they didn't. What they did was, they gave who
they thought to be an Al-Qaeda operative exactly what he had
asked for. Batiste is mentally competent
to represent a threat that would be of interest to somebody like
Al-Qaeda or ISIS, you know. They, they'd love to identify
people like this. And I'm not suggesting that
they're gonna recruit him to put a backpack filled with
explosives and walk into a mall. The fact that he's willing to
assist in a conspiracy to blow up a building in the United
States is no less dangerous. Whether that's acquiring SIM
cards, or checking out library books, stealing a car, on its
own, it's, doesn't seem like much.
But if the ultimate purpose is to conduct a terrorist attack,
well, then, yeah, I think he does represent a threat.
♪ ♪ (camera shutter clicks)
So the decision was made that we were going to indict Batiste,
the other six members of his group, and arrest them.
One of the things that they did to earn a living was, they did
stucco for buildings. And so, we called a contact that
has several rental properties in Miami and says, "Would you call
these guys and see if you could hire them to do some stucco
work for you?" My understanding is, they were
actually on ladders when they were arrested by the SWAT team.
♪ ♪ Breaking news out of Miami.
Anti-terrorism raids by the FBI, as well as state and local
police. Seven people right now are under
arrest. I had Minerva there, I had my
daughter Narcassia, and my son Prince.
And they told me and my family to get on the ground.
They all, they held machine guns to my kids' and my wife's
head and my head. I was scared for my life or
they would shoot us. They had guns drawn at us,
pointing at my children. I thought it was just something
of, as, a ticket he hadn't paid, or, or maybe a violation
he had made somewhere. It was, like, 50 agents.
They swarmed around me real quick.
They were, like, "Get on the ground, get on the (bleep)
ground! Get on the (bleep) ground."
I said, "(bleep)!" I'm thinking of everything I did
back in the day. I'm, like, "Damn, they caught up
with me." And then the oath and then the
pictures and everything flashed in my mind, I'm, like, "It was a
setup." Breaking news tonight,
terror-related arrests in Miami. FBI agents swoop in on a
Liberty City neighborhood to foil an alleged plot to commit
terror acts in Miami and Chicago.
I see my brother on television saying he's a, a
terrorist. Investigators say one of the
seven, Narseal Batiste, was the ringleader.
"Ringleader"?! I said, "A ringleader?!"
Oh, my God. I said, "This boy can't even put
cows in the pasture, how's he a ringleader?"
I'm, like, this is no way, and I mean, I was so hurt.
I just fell to my knees and I started crying, because I'm,
like, "This is not true. This is not my brother."
We now go back to Larry King's exclusive interview with
the director of the FBI, Robert Mueller.
Federal agents are conducting a terrorism-related
investigation in Liberty City. That's an area of the city of
Miami. What can you tell us?
I can tell you that we do have ongoing operation in, in
Miami. We are conducting a, a number of
arrests and searches. Big concern?
Whenever we undertake an operation like this, we would
not do it without the approval of a judge.
We've got search warrants and arrest warrants and the like,
and so, yes, it's a concern. (siren blaring)
♪ ♪ Good morning, I'm joined
today by FBI Deputy Director John Pistole and Assistant
Attorney General Alice Fischer of the Criminal Division.
The fact that there was a press conference where the
attorney general speaks, it's a pretty big deal for the
Department of Justice. Seven men were arrested
yesterday in Miami on charges of, of conspiring to support the
Al-Qaeda terrorist organization by planning attacks on numerous
targets, including bombing the Sears Tower in Chicago...
Listen, we're gonna go after people that engage in any, any
kind of contact that's similar to this.
And I think that's a very powerful message, a very
powerful tool, that the attorney general is using the stick of
the Department of Justice to try to discourage this kind of
behavior from happening again. These individuals wished to wage
a, a "full ground war against the United States."
The ridiculousness of that opening announcement by Gonzales
is astounding. I think I wrote that, "Wage a
ground war against the United States?
This group couldn't wage a ground war against a jar of
peppercorns." It was clear that from the
highest levels of the Department of Justice, that this
prosecution had been approved and was being touted as, like, a
success of the government's counter-terrorism program.
I think what struck everyone was that Alberto Gonzales seemed to
know very little about the specifics of this case.
Did any of the, uh, men have any actual contact with any
members of Al-Qaeda, that you know of?
Any...? No.
Yeah. The, the answer to that, the
answer to that is no. They had no money.
They had no weapons. They weren't even Islamic
extremists. Ultimately, we realized it was a
sting operation. The way this all unfolded seemed
very improbable. Very forced.
And it really looked like the FBI had led these men down the
primrose path. Was there anything against
the Sears Tower except this one apparent discuss... just kind of
a mention of the Sears Tower? Doesn't look like they ever took
pictures or did any of...? One of the individuals was
familiar with the Sears Tower, had worked in Chicago, and had
been there. So was familiar with the, with
the tower. I wanted to distinguish this for
the media, 'cause one of my concerns was that we not
over-hype things. That, you know, this is, this
is another 9/11 cell, that they're ready, willing, and able
to die and had means of accomplishing their attacks.
And so, I described it as an, that this was an aspirational
group rather than an operational group.
In terms of the plans, it was more aspirational than, than
operational. I think the public and the
media began to realize very quickly that this was just not a
strong case. That it was a weak case.
It looks like these guys were actually asking for material
support from what they thought was Al-Qaeda.
These, these guys couldn't buy boots on their own?
They don't sound like very sophisticated or, or, you know,
effective operators. These guys didn't have, you
know, the ability to, you know, blow up anything, let alone the
Sears Tower. Did you find any explosives,
weapons...? And you raise a, a good
point. You know, you know, our
philosophy here is that we try to identify plots in the
earliest stages possible, because we don't know what we,
what we don't know about, about a terrorism plot.
You know, I hate to criticize an attorney general, but when he
said, "We had taken out an Al-Qaeda cell," yes, I...
I knew that was going to be a problem.
He went overboard. They were not an Al-Qaeda cell.
They were not directed by Al-Qaeda.
You know, that is an overstatement.
So the charges were valid. It was, it was the over-hyping
of the case. So they're charged with
providing material support to a terrorist organization, namely
Al-Qaeda, even though there was no actual connection to
Al-Qaeda. The problem with terrorism
cases is, you have to stop the act.
And so, you really, in a way, have to predict who's going to
do what. And so, stings are very
important, but if you overstate what you have done in a sting,
then people begin to lose confidence in what you're doing.
They think that you're just out there creating a terrorist
yourself. I had been doing undercover
work in terrorism cases for a decade before 9/11.
And before 9/11, if I had called FBI headquarters and said, "I
want to initiate an undercover operation targeting a terrorist
group," uh, the first question they would have asked me is,
"Okay, what terrorist group do this, these individuals belong
to?" And if I said, "Well, they don't
actually belong to a terrorist group, they're just saying
things that sound kind of scary and things that terrorists
might say." And they would say, "Okay, well,
what kind of weapons do they have?"
And if I replied, "Well, they don't actually have any weapons,
and part of the plot would be to supply them with weapons."
And then they would say, "Well, what plot do they have in mind?"
And I would say, "Well, they haven't actually identified a
plot yet. Part of the operation would be
to identify a plot and then provide them the weapons so that
they could be terrorists." Uh, they would have sent me
for counseling. Thank you.
Through 2005 and 2006, there
had been a very heated debate over extending expiring
provisions of the Patriot Act. So I think that there was great
pressure on the FBI to demonstrate both that there was
a powerful threat that still existed inside the United States
that justified this expanded surveillance authority, and that
the tools that they had been given through the Patriot Act
were actually effective in identifying these plots.
(siren blaring) Correctional officers in the
building all of a sudden start running to my cell and pointing
at me, and bringing people. So, it's, like, all of a sudden,
everybody coming to take a look at me.
And it was, like, "Well, this is a terrorism case.
You know, you finna get shipped to Guantanamo."
When he said that, I could feel my stomach turn.
I think for the next three days, I had, like, diarrhea... it
was just, it was a shock. And then I knew what I was
getting charged with, and, you know, I just, I just hid up
under the, um, the blanket, you know, while people come point at
me, and, you know, it was, it was horrifying.
If they were homegrown terrorists, they grew up here,
on this Miami street. Stanley Phanor was born in this
house. Lyglenson Lemorin moved in
across the street with his mom when he was just six.
And today, the two mothers, both Haitian, told us in disbelief
there were no terrorists raised on 45th Street.
They have this, everything. They have this to put on...
(indistinct) And they calling him
illegal immigrant on the TV. My son is good from your
country! ♪ ♪
The objective then becomes to solicit the cooperation of one
of the defendants. To flip someone.
And he was telling me, "Are you seriously thinking about
spending the rest of your life in prison?"
I said, "Man, I don't wanna spend the rest of my life in
prison." They're, like, "Okay, then, so
the only way you could do that is by signing these papers."
I'm, like, "I'mma set myself free without signing those
papers." We was looking at the younger
brothers, um, Naudimar and B. And we was, like, "You know
what, just, um, just sign what you gotta sign."
You know what I'm... ♪ ♪
(shuddered breath) We told them brothers, Naudimar
and B, "Man, sign what you gotta sign, man, and get out of
this. You know, you real young."
And, you know, they got upset. They was, like, "No, we're not
signing." We facing 70 years and three
life sentences, and, you know, them brothers was, like, nah,
they not. You know, and I definitely
wasn't. You know, so...
Yeah, nobody was willing to sign off that they was
terrorism. But more so, nobody was willing
to... Yeah, nobody was willing to send
they brother, who they know what we was out there doing in
them streets, you know, up the road for a charge that, that
wasn't us. I refused every plea.
I talked to my lawyer, I told my lawyer... my lawyer couldn't
understand it. I told him that's basically how
I got to be, because I was with these brothers.
I knew what they was about. I knew if I get, take any plea,
even regardless of plea that said that I didn't know nothing
about that, then I'm, then it actually saying something about
my, my brothers that's left in there that I knew they was not
about what they say they was about.
Prosecutors laid out their case against seven men dubbed
the Liberty City Seven, accused of conspiring to blow up the
Sears Tower in Chicago. You have to understand that,
in the counter-terrorism field, the criminal penalties
associated with the laws that are used, particularly laws like
the material support for terrorism law, come with
draconian penalties. So, if a defense attorney went
to a client who was charged with terrorism charges and said,
"Hey, look, you know, you're looking at 30 or 40 years in
jail if you go to trial and are convicted, but the government's
offering you to plead out to five years," even somebody who
is entirely innocent or believes that they were induced
into committing some kind of crime, it wouldn't be unusual
for them to plead guilty to it. So, the Liberty City Seven case
was fascinating to me, both because it showed me that all of
the defendants were willing to go to trial, showed me that they
were convinced they had done nothing wrong.
And moreover, it gave one of the very first opportunities to
really examine the FBI's tactics, because all of the
information would come out through the criminal trial.
The challenge for the Liberty Seven defense: the suspects did
indeed pledge an oath to Al-Qaeda.
When you have the attorney general of the United States
having a press conference, I realized that I was in for a
major battle going forward. Our story was a simple one: they
didn't have the manner and means, they had no money... they
barely had vehicles. They didn't have horses and they
certainly didn't have bombs. This is a case manufactured
primarily by the government, or in my case, my client's case,
this wasn't his idea. It was just a complete, you
know, setup by the government. The plot was being moved forward
by the informants and the FBI. Who directed their activities.
They ran this whole show. They, they provided the script.
They provided the choreography, okay?
They provided the direction. This was not a terrorist case at
all, let alone a case where the actors, the defendants, were
moving the plot forward. They invented the players,
they invented the theme, they invented how it was gonna go
down. They, they wrote this script.
They wrote this script. One of the other defense
attorneys said this was all really a inner-city scam.
Well, we do know that, first of all, that one of the things
that was done in this case was that there was a serious
question with regard to $50,000 being given to these individuals
to help them to revitalize this building.
Here's Narseal saying, "We've gotta get this $50,000, so, man,
just go along with this plan for me, and then we're gonna be
good after that. Just go along with it.
No, we're not gonna do anything, but just go along with it."
And so, the defense became that, that these guys were doing
this just for the money, that this was one big scam.
It would have been a scam. It would have been a scam had he
given us pictures of the Waffle House.
Or, you know, given us a blank disc.
Or, or just not have given us footage of the FBI office, the
U.S. attorney's office, and the Miami Police Department.
So, it's not a scam. I mean, that is a, an executed
agreement. Whether these people were
being paid or not, the question is, are they willing to commit
these acts? Whether it's for money or it's
for free. So it really made no difference.
Prosecutors told the jury they'll hear from among 15,000
government recordings of the group's plan to create chaos.
I'm hearing this for the first time.
Now I know why we got indicted. Because in my mind, I thought
the only meetings that occurred was the ones I was there.
He's a (bleep) nut. What the (bleep) is you running
your (bleep)-damn mouth for? On and on and on.
My life was on the line, but I just couldn't believe the
words that was coming out of Batiste's mouth.
I couldn't believe I was on trial for these conversations.
♪ ♪ Narseal got on the stand.
I was literally yelling at him about how his stupidity and the
things he did got these guys in trouble.
And he's sitting up there and he's crying.
And, you know, and I said, "And here you are.
You stepped off what we call a, a... the square, if you will,
which is of righteousness, and you led these guys down, you
know, to the wrong path. And everybody is now sitting up
here indicted by a federal government, looking at and being
called terrorists," and he's... He's bawling, he's crying.
I cried about it on the witness stand.
Said it was something that I really didn't mean inside.
That I was just going along with Abbas's game, using his
language. Him and Assaad.
I wanted to stand up and shout and say that, "I'm not this
person. I'm really a good person on the
inside. I would never do these things.
It was just a con game." ♪ ♪
I kind of felt that he should have been a little stronger.
You know what I mean? 'Cause we was all together, you
know, trying to give each other support.
But he'll just, um, he'll just ball up in a corner, and it was
just, it was a lot of guilt. You know, of the things he said,
you know. You know, all of us getting
locked up with him and, you know, his family image, you
know, everything was destroyed and, you know, it took a toll on
him. ♪ ♪
I did a, maybe a year and eight months in Miami FDC.
I was in solitary confinement. They call it the SHU.
Yeah, you probably go crazy in there, you know, and I tell
people maybe I am, maybe I'm not, I...
But it's, um... You don't do that to another
human being. ♪ ♪
One day, a guy walked by me. And then he, like, said, "What's
up?" to me with just a head nod. And, you know, I was at the
little window, it's like a little... six-inch window, and
I'm looking, and I gave him a head nod.
And then I walked back to my chair, and I'm just sitting
there, and it hit me, "I just seen Batiste!"
So, I... I couldn't believe it.
You know, I couldn't believe it. He was a totally different
person. He was skin and bones and, you
know, it was times I hear... I heard him, you know, screaming
in his cell. I think it just about killed
him. I think it just about killed
him. ♪ ♪
After two long months of trial, the jurors couldn't
decide any of the charges for the so-called Liberty City
Seven. There was a lot of
disagreement, but all of the jurors worked very hard.
Um, everybody gave it, gave it their all and came here every
day, for many, many months, and uh, and did the best that we
could. I think the jury as a whole kind
of felt sorry for these guys. That they got, they've wound
themselves up in this position, but, you know, they, to some
extent, they did it themselves. There were a few people that
really bought into this idea that they were just doing this
to scam this guy out of money. Which seems sort of odd, like,
um, to be scamming Al-Qaeda. They're not the type of people
that you would think about really running a scam on, I
wouldn't think. They would seem like kind of
scary guys to, to cross. That's why I think there was a
hung jury, except that one defendant who they felt really
had very little connection and wasn't around for most of this,
and we dismissed the case against him.
Found him not guilty. One of seven Miami men
accused of plotting to join forces with Al-Qaeda has been
acquitted, and a mistrial has been declared for the six other
men. They said, "Lyglenson Lemorin
not guilty for the first charge. Lyglenson Lemorin not guilty
for the second charge, for the third charge, for the fourth
charge." And everybody was so happy.
Was he crying? I couldn't tell...
Yes, we both were. Very emotional.
Levi was found not guilty at the first trial.
And it was fantastic. Thought he'd be able to move on
with his life. Well, I went back, we all
thought I'm going home, packed my stuff, and then that's when
Immigration came and got me. ♪ ♪
The judge found that he had associated himself with a
terrorist group, and that in and of itself was deportable.
You look at my case, I have no conviction... nothing.
That trial was my only thing and I've been working all my life.
I got kids, wife. I married a American.
I beat the case. I beat the case and I'm sent
home. You can be found not guilty,
but it still doesn't mean you're not guilty in the eyes of the
U.S. government. He couldn't even come back to
the United States for his 15-year-old son's funeral when
he was killed, um, along the highway, trying to assist a
motorist who had been stalled and their car had broken down.
It's a pain where you can't...
You don't know, it's almost like your heart's closing and
you don't know what to do. And I zoned out.
You know, life start over, life ain't finished.
God is great. I'mma continue to be me.
I'mma continue to strive to better myself.
(indistinct chatter) It's really, nothing changed
about how I feel America. I love America.
America's a great country. But what happened to us, it's
not America that did it. You know, it's not America.
It's a few people in America that people put their trust in.
Federal prosecutors say they will retry the six men on whom
the jurors deadlocked. Judge Joan Lenard set jury
selection for January. It's hard to be able to look
at the media once you've arrested somebody and called
them a terrorist, and then drop the case against them after one
trial, saying, "Okay, we're gonna let them back out on the
streets to complete what they were trying to do."
And so the government had to retry the case.
And they tried it a second time. And it hung a second time for
the same reasons. We did, we tried it again,
and there was another mistrial. A federal judge has declared
another mistrial. Prosecutors now have a week to
decide if they're going to try them for a third time.
When that trial came to, um, a hung jury again, we just knew
they was gonna throw this case out.
There ain't no way they coming back again for another trial
with us, 'cause it was so embarrassing.
My experience has been, it's, it's two times and they're done.
But it depends on the case. If they want somebody bad
enough, they continue to go after the person.
And they wanted these guys, badly.
Two juries failed to reach a verdict.
Now a third jury will try. Imagine if we did nothing
about this case, and instead of the FBI coming to, to Batiste,
one of these organizations actually came to Batiste and
provided him the explosives. So, could we ignore it?
And if we had ignored it, and he had blown up a building, he had
done damage to this building you're sitting in right now, and
people were killed, wouldn't you be coming back to us to
say, "Why didn't you do something about it?
Why did you ignore it?" This is the question: do you
want us to stop them before they commit this kind of crime, or,
or do you want to let it happen first?
So the government said, "We're gonna give this one last
try. A third time."
And each time they tried the case, the case got smaller, and
more defined and more focused. And even with the third trial,
they really flailed, because the jurors were out for almost 12,
13 days. So, it looked like it was gonna
be another hung jury. The jury went out for
deliberations and there was one juror who refused to deliberate.
She just refused. So, the judge had to excuse that
juror. Within 24 hours, an alternate
was brought in and he joined the other 11 and convicted five of
the six. A sixth defendant was found not
guilty. After the verdict was read,
the one Liberty Six member who was acquitted called the
prosecution of his friends "bogus."
You had no intention of doing any of the things that you
talked about? It was all a whole bunch of
hogwash from the beginning. You weren't serious about any
of it? Nobody was serious about
nothing. It's not real.
Give us a little space, please.
♪ ♪ It took three years and three
trials, but a group of Florida men accused in a plot to destroy
Chicago's Sears Tower are each facing decades in prison.
♪ ♪ I felt like I got hit in the
head with an 80-ton concrete ball or something.
Or knocked out. I cried.
Thought my life was over. All based on what I said.
A certain part of me just died there.
And now, I was left with four young children to raise without
no other family, no other help. But just me and them.
You're taking this innocent man away from his... and all the
rest of these young men... away from their families, without no
evidence. I can't be living this.
I can't. I can't be living this.
♪ ♪ I have a responsibility to
the people that I, I work for, which are the citizens of the
United States, to, to go where the facts and evidence leads.
I've looked at this a thousand ways to Sunday.
I wish I could say, "Look, this is what happened, and, and this
is how..." I, I just can't...
I can't get myself there. They did what they were
convicted of. ♪ ♪
The problem was, there were a lot of sensitive issues in this
case. For instance, we got them a
warehouse where we had cameras and, and they had a meeting, and
they swore the oath to Al-Qaeda. But we could have delivered them
a, a load of arms and munitions; made the arms and munitions
inoperable, but delivered them. Once they accepted that, we
could have taken them down with the, the munitions in their hand
and I think that would have been far, far more effective.
But at that time, the bureau was so nervous about providing
potential terrorists with weaponry that they just flat-
out said, "No, you can't do that."
Al-Qaeda didn't know any of these individuals.
They didn't have anybody who could have done a full ground
war in the United States or, uh, taken down the Sears Tower.
But many Americans believe they did because the FBI manufactured
this plot. I was hoping that they would
learn that this case was an overreach, they had gone too
far, and perhaps undermined public trust in the
counterterrorism tactics that they were using.
But they seem to have taken the opposite lesson.
And what you see in the sting operations after Liberty City
Seven is an effort to sensationalize the cases even
further, to where they will go to the extent of actually
providing significant weaponry to these groups.
Yesterday during an FBI sting operation.
He's a U.S. citizen... Demetrius Pitts faces charges
after he communicated with an undercover agent.
He believed that the FBI planted this bombing plot...
undercover agents who said they could help him bomb the
mall... They set this kid up.
If you lay out sting operations on a chart, you know,
what you see is this enormous uptick after 2009.
I think it's just further emboldened the FBI and the
Department of Justice in its use of these types of sting
operations, knowing that essentially, if they can convict
these guys in Miami, you know, they can convict just about
anybody. ♪ ♪
The Liberty City/Sears Tower case was significant in the
sense of taking people with bad motives, bad intent, off the
street, holding them accountable, and then serving as
a deterrent to other potential terrorists.
Were these terrorists in a real sense?
My personal opinion was no, because... and that's why I
describe them as aspirational rather than operational...
Because I didn't believe they, they could do something based on
what I had seen. I'm not gonna hype these
cases to be something that they're not.
But they're very important, because if, if we can't do 'em,
it's gonna be hard to stop terrorists.
The Liberty City case was one of the cases that we would use in
training: okay, this is a cautionary tale.
You know, be careful as to how far your, your undercover agents
or your informants push. And when you do arrest, you
know, don't overstate what, what you've got.
The goal is not to take somebody that is not a terrorist and make
them a terrorist. They weren't really the, the
terrorists that we were seeking out.
♪ ♪ This is my job.
I was hired as a supervisor, underneath the project manager,
to run the job site with small contractors.
This is excellent, uh, it's... It might not be as, as good as
me subcontracting things on my own, and making more money in a,
in a momentous type of way. But it's a steady income, I'm on
salary pay. And I'm, I'm just happy.
♪ ♪ Did you ever imagine that you
were being recorded? Yes.
You did? You knew that you were being
videoed? Yes.
It was, it was clear. Did you see where the video
cameras were? No, they were hidden cameras.
Did you tell the brothers that you thought your meetings
with Assaad might have been recorded by law enforcement?
Yes. ♪ ♪
I still don't really understand how you thought you
could get away with it even if you got the money.
Yeah, I didn't seem... I didn't really...
At the end of the day, I thought about it and said, "I
probably won't get away with it, but I'll just spend some of it,
and if they caught me, 'Hey, I'm sorry I took the money.
Can I give it back? I spent some of it.'"
That's what I thought I could use as an excuse.
♪ ♪ I wonder if he's trying to
save face. Because he realized how stupid
he was. Everybody makes mistakes, but
not everybody's mistakes is recorded for the world to see
over and over and over again. His is.
So that was his best answer is trying to say, "Aw, yeah, I'm
smart." Nah, you was just that dumb.
That's all that was. That's all that was.
He didn't know? He didn't know.
♪ ♪
Finance was becoming a problem because of my case.
So it was hard to find employment or anything else.
So, when I did find employment, it was, like, a bull(bleep) ass
job. And I said, "I'mma take this
job, or take this check, and I'mma mix this through what I
know best." Which is go back to the street
and go back to the hustling game, to the cocaine or
whatever, and just mix and mingle with the people I know.
They're so concerned with terrorist, uh, watch, I was
selling dope under their eyes the whole time, and I was on
federal probation. So they couldn't be that
concerned with me. They couldn't have.
I made money. ♪ ♪
In terms of Batiste, nah, I wanted to strangle the guy, man,
because I felt like, you don't listen.
You got caught up in yourself, and now this is what this come
down. And this is not just something
that affect us immediately. It affect all, every last one of
our families. Of course I wanted to strangle
his ass. ♪ ♪
I lose part of me.
I lost everything I was. My whole 30s was spent in
prison. In your 30s, that's when you buy
a house, you know what I mean? You start to be financially
sound, you know? Having kids, you know... I spent
all that time in prison. So, I'm out right now, I don't
got no kids. No, no wife, no girlfriend...
No real job. (laughing)
Oh, man! (whistles)
♪ ♪ Captioned by
Media Access Group at WGBH access.wgbh.org
For more on this and other "Frontline" programs, visit our
website at pbs.org/frontline. ♪ ♪
Frontline's "In the Shadow of 9/11,"
is avaliable on Amazon Prime Video.