The Terror Factory Read Online Free PDF Page B

religious studies to Christian texts, and Islam and the Koran intrigued him particularly—something his father tried to dissuade. “I didn’t agree with it, but he was a man by then and I didn’t think I could argue with him about it,” Narcisse Batiste said. 18 Despite this, Batiste never identified himself as a Muslim. By the time he and his family moved to Miami in 2001, Batiste considered himself a member of the Moorish Science Temple, a religious sect that blends Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. He’d preach to anyone who’d listen and offered martial arts training to disadvantaged, mostly black, kids in Liberty City. He wanted to help clean up Liberty City, and six men—Haitians and African Americans—joined him to form something of a group. Batiste also ran a drywall business, Azteca Stucco and Masonry, out of a run-down warehouse, and his followers were also his employees.
    Above all, however, Batiste was a natural-born bullshitterand hustler. That’s how he came to strike up a friendship with the young al-Saidi at the convenience store in North Miami. Batiste, who was trying to keep his drywall business solvent while he and his family were living in a cramped one-bedroom apartment, told al-Saidi he was looking for ways to make money. Al-Saidi said he knew people who could help. “You’re always looking for money, and I have some people in Yemen I can introduce you to who would fund your organization, but you gotta spin it the right way, and I’ll help you do that,” al-Saidi said, according to the story Batiste told his lawyers.
    What happened next isn’t entirely clear. What is known is that al-Saidi left the United States to visit his wife and family in Yemen and returned on a ticket paid for by the FBI. His task: to infiltrate a terrorist cell in Miami.
    Rory J. McMahon sat behind a conference table inside his office in North Fort Lauderdale. It was a fall afternoon in 2009, several years after he had been hired by defense lawyers to investigate Abbas al-Saidi. But the case still bothered him. A private investigator who had previously worked as a federal probation officer, McMahon was asked to piece together how exactly al-Saidi came to be an informant who identified a supposed terrorist cell in the poorest section of Miami. That investigation led McMahon to a public housing project in Brooklyn, New York, and a young woman named Stephanie Jennings, who was al-Saidi’s girlfriend. Jennings told McMahon that al-Saidi had been working as an informant for the New York Police Department’s Intelligence Division, which since 9/11 has aggressively monitored Muslim communities in New York and New Jersey. 19 For some reason—Jennings was never told why—NYPD handlers became concerned for al-Saidi’ssafety and moved him and Jennings to a city-funded public housing project. But they didn’t stay there long.
    One afternoon, one of al-Saidi’s friends from the Middle East knocked on the door. Jennings, home alone, let him in, and with al-Saidi not around, the friend raped her in the apartment. Jennings went to the police and pressed charges; when al-Saidi returned home, she told him what happened. “Instead of saying, ‘I’m going to go kill the motherfucker,’ his response was, ‘We can use this to get money,’ because she pressed charges,” McMahon recalled. “So he goes to the guy. ‘Give me $7,000 and I’ll get Stephanie to drop the rape charge against you.’ So that’s what they do, and he uses the $7,000 for seed money to move to Miami.”
    In South Florida, al-Saidi and Jennings lived in a neatly kept apartment building in Miami Beach, just steps from Biscayne Bay and near the Seventy-Ninth Street Causeway. But their relationship wasn’t as neatly kept as their building. On November 10, 2004, Jennings stepped out of the apartment to smoke a cigarette, which annoyed al-Saidi. When