The Imaginary Plot to Blow Up JFK

I represented one of the so-called JFK bombers — the people who purportedly hatched a plot in 2006 to blow up fuel tanks at JFK airport.  All were older men from the Caribbean.  None could have pulled it off.

I thought about this recently because my client, Abdul Kadir, a 66-year-old man from Guyana, died in prison last week.  He’d been in jail, sentenced to life, since 2007. In his home country, he’d been a person of renown — a Parliamentarian, mayor, engineer, proud father of nine, grandfather, a community bulwark and religious leader.

Here, he was a terrorist, but he didn’t deserve the title.  While the government claimed credit for stopping what they called “one of the most chilling plots imaginable,” the whole idea was a fiction, technically it never could have happened.  It was steered not by a putative terrorist but by Steven Francis, a two-time drug dealer working for police to trade off his own life sentence.

It began in 2006 when Francis pleaded guilty for the second time to drug trafficking.  He was facing a sentence of 25 to life.  He signed a cooperation agreement with state and federal law enforcement which promised that if Francis brought them terrorists, he’d get a lower sentence or no jail at all. That’s a pretty good incentive. His job was to pretend to be Muslim, infiltrate Muslim centers, mostly mosques, and suss out terrorist plots.

Francis did his job well. He studied Arabic, took a Muslim name, and frequented mosques in New York and New Jersey as a congregant.  What he really was, was a spy.  In one mosque, he befriended an older disgruntled former baggage handler at JFK, Russell Defreitas.  Defreitas was a complainer with few friends and little money. Francis showered him with attention.  He listened to Defreitas’s complaints against the U.S., starting with not being paid enough at his job.  Defreitas mentioned he was so angry he’d like to blow up JFK airport.

Finally, Francis had a plot to run with.  He suggested they video the grounds around JFK, but Defreitas had no camera. (He didn’t even drive.)  Francis drove him to B&H and bought him a camera so they could film the airport. So inept was Defreitas at filming that most of the footage were shots of the car’s back seat floor and ceiling.

Although Francis pressed him, Defreitas knew no one in the U.S. interested in furthering the plot.  So the two flew to Guyana (Defreitas’s home country) with tickets paid for by Francis (underwritten by the joint terrorism task force.)

Defreitas was flattered.  Being escorted by a young man who treated him well, drove him wherever he needed, bought him food, paid for his apartment, even ferried his clothes to the laundry — what’s not to like?

Meanwhile, Francis was pushed by handlers to develop the plot further so that arrests could be made. No arrests, no sentence reduction.

In Guyana’s capitol, Georgetown, they found no one interested in joining them. Some suspected Francis was not a true Muslim and thought the old man, Defreitas, didn’t have the smarts to blow up a firecracker, no less an airport. Through a friend of a friend they were then referred to a civil engineer, Abdul Kadir, from the remote town of Linden. Kadir had good standing in his community, was well educated, and needed foreign money to realize his dream — to build a Shiite mosque in his town.

Abdul Kadir welcomed Francis and Defreitas to his home.  The two came from the U.S. and had mosque connections there, so perhaps they could help his fundraising efforts.  When Francis introduced the idea of blowing up JFK fuel tanks, instead of kicking them out of the house, Kadir looked at the map they’d downloaded from Google earth and commented how the fuel tanks were probably double-barreled and difficult to blow up.  Kadir told them he wasn’t interested but (and this was his big mistake) said he’d look for someone who might be.  He never did.

Kadir was arrested on an upcoming trip to Iran.  He’d been invited as the Shiite emissary from his region, but U.S. agents believed he was looking for support for the JFK plot.  His computer was seized and an ugly photo was recovered showing him bare-chested and strapped with what appeared to be a machine gun.  It was a toy, used for Carnival in his country. (We corroborated this in an investigatory trip to Guyana.)

But the damage had been done. The media covered the story as though the plot was real, foiled only by clever police work.

Kadir was extradited to the U.S. and tried. Both he and Defreitas were convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Kadir was said to be the brains of operation. He was more educated than the other dope, but had no motive in blowing up JFK and no more involvement than meeting Defreitas and Francis a handful of times.  When he was convicted, the case haunted me for years.

Francis got the best of the bargain. After testifying at trial, his sentence was reduced to a pittance. He didn’t have to go back to jail. He’d been tasked with finding terrorists and he did, even if the defendants never would have considered a plot to harm the U.S. had they never met him.

As more and more “plots” like this — invented by police informants or orchestrated by undercover agents — came to light, it became clear that not all terrorist plots are equal.  Some are invented and pushed by U.S. law enforcement, others (the real ones) are independent. It would have been nice had the judge seen it this way and sentenced Kadir to less than life.

The so-called plot to blow up JFK was always a non-starter, concocted by a hapless, former JFK worker who, unfortunately for him and Kadir, met Steven Francis looking for a get-out-of-jail-free card.

The day Kadir died from what the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) described as a “short illness,” his family called me. They had no idea he’d been sick. How do they get his body back to Guyana for proper burial? How to pay the cost? How to know what really happened?  On the day of his death, the Guyanese papers talked of his achievements and ran full obits.  U.S. papers, meanwhile, noted briefly, “Foiled JFK Bomber Dies in Prison at 66.”

While there was no “plot” to foil, the cultivation of the so-called plot derailed lives — the lives of two of the defendants (Kadir and another died in jail) — and the cost to his nine children and 18 grandchildren, most of whom never saw him again once he was extradited.

Did Kadir do the wrong thing in playing along with Francis and Defreitas? Yes.  But was it a foiled terrorist plot? No.

Kadir was an imperfect man who fell prey to a dream — a dream to build a mosque in his town for the betterment of his people.  His ego got in the way of his good sense.  I liked the man. RIP.

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Toni Messina has tried over 100 cases and has been practicing criminal law and immigration since 1990. You can follow her on Twitter: @tonitamess.