A sharp sound crackled in the quiet of the morning, and the hairy creature snoring and sleepy near his cave came to waken quickly. In one swift movement, he was to his feet. He quick checked his youngster lying on deerskin within the cave. Good, his kid was sleeping peaceful without any danger being near. Ungainly, the man shambled then to the lip of the narrow stone ledge and, blinking against the spring sunlight, peered out across the tall trees to the river below. There at dawn and at dusk the animals came to drink. But now, its bank was deserted. In the glade a sapling bent. A moment after, the crack of its breaking reached the man. A great, dark shape bulked momentarily in the dappled shade. The terrifying beast was feeding.
Instinctively, the man reached for the sharp stone he had found at the river bank two winters ago. He cuddled it in his hand; his palm fitted snugly against it; his fingers found good purchase. It was a good thing, this stone. he had smashed in a deer's head in with it the evening before, and slaughtered that slimy slithering thing which hissed at his cave opening this morning. In some ways, it was a better thing than a club. If he had a club, with a stone like this at its end ... Glancing about himself once more, he went back to be near the child. There he squatted down; and almost at once his eyes closed again. The man sighed as he lay in the sun because he had fed to his full the night before, and there was more raw meat in the cave. Coming back empty handed from the hunt, he had chanced upon a saber-toothed tiger's chewed leavings a moment after the killer cat strolled off to take a nap. He pulled the torn carcass of deer to his cave home, and the woman cooked burnt gobs of sweet tender flesh on the fire they always kept burning. They gorged until their bellies could not hold more. Waking up at dawn the man was still hungry. A cold marrow bone and a few small worms he found underneath brush had sufficed to break the long night's fast. So he sat motionless in the sunshine, except for his fingers that explored the mat of hair covering his chest and belly Now and then he would rout out some lice; these he cracked between powerful jaws and swallowed: despite his doubt, the morsels were quite tasty. Then beside him, the young critter woke. It moved, waving its tiny little hands and kicking its feet. It spewed out little gurgling sounds. The man listened quietly to the liquid syllables. "Wa wa, wa," the small one moaned: Then "Coo, coo," it piped; as the man thought about the birds in the tall trees calling one another in nightfall. Suddenly, the child's noises changed to fretful, lips, loosely moving over toothless gums, made a new sound, "Ma, ma." Again and again, it moaned and whimpered, "Ma, ma; ma, ma."Disturbed, the man jumped to his feet. But the woman was there in a flash before him, swift and silent on bare feet, she took the child up from the deer skin, holding it close to her breast. At once, the child's wailing stopped: there was the soft slup slup of its lips as it suckled. In the man's brain, memories spun around rapidly. Dimly, he recalled another child--the child a fierce saber-toothed tiger had carried off before their eyes.
That child, too, had fretted and whimpered, and made the sound "ma, ma" when it hungered. And at the sound, he remembered, the woman, leaving her tasks in the cave, had gone to it and given it suck.
The man took up his trusty sharp stone again and began scratching aimlessly at the rock of the ledge. Something about the pictures his brain created both disturbed and excited him. They roused in him the same uneasiness he had known the day he climbed all alone to the top of the highest hill and gazed out over the un imagined vastness of the plains beyond the river. In his perturbation, he got to his feet, tossing lank clumping black hair back from his sloping forehead, and went to the rim of the ledge to stare down toward the river. But its bank was deserted; the glade also were empty, the saplings stood still in the tranquil morning; in the canebrake, nothing moved at all.
Behind him, the woman lay the child down and, quietly, she moved back into the cave.
The child burped, gurgled and cooed and at last went silent.
The man turned to look at it. It was sleeping peacefully again. In the growing warmth the man mused. On a time many winters past, memory told him, he himself had been a child; and so he must once have been a tiny helpless hairless little critter like this one, that loudly wailed when it was hungry and fed at a woman's breast. He wondered idly if he had made the same noises that this critter made,
and the other made when they hungered. Tentatively, silently, he shaped his thick lips to try creating the sounds. . . .
He heard a rustling leaf behind him. He wheeled, in sudden prescience of danger. In a low thicket beside the cave mouth, a huge and wild wolf crouched. It was mangy, skinny from hunger. Its red-rimmed eyes were fixed on the sleeping child.
Stealthily, belly to ground, the fierce wolf inched upon its tiny prey. In the instant after the man turned to see, it was near enough. It gathered for the spring.
The man's eyes measured quickly. He was too far away. He could not reach the child in time. Before he could traverse half the distance, the wolf would pounce, clamp slavering jaws on the infant, and be off into the underbrush.
A moment the man stood frozen, in the paralysis of helplessness. Then his lips shaped to remembered sounds. To his surprise the great roar of his voice shattered the stillness. "Ma, ma!" he bellowed. "Ma, ma!"
The hungry wolf started.It jerked bared fangs at the man.Then it's eyes went back to the child; it tensed again. But as it did, the woman appeared in the cave mouth. Old practice of peril had schooled her well. Instantly, she scooped up the child and stepped back to safety. The wolf' moved toward the now empty deerskin, then quickly pounced instead off into the forest's thickness.
The woman returned, carrying the little child. The man's brain had at last come to the end of the thing that had disturbed it. He put out one hand and pointed it at the woman.
Photo-Illustration: Mark Harris. Photo courtesy of of the National Transportation Safety Board
This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
On September 4, 2018,
Nauman Hussain, a 28-year-old professional paintball player, was
working at his family’s business when a state inspector arrived for a
routine visit. Nauman’s father owned Prestige Limousine, a small company
touting “modern, classy vehicles” for “exquisite wedding, prom, event,
and special occasion” transportation in the Albany area, and Nauman
operated it day to day, sometimes answering to his father’s name. The
inspector examined Prestige’s vehicles and placed an orange-and-white
sticker roughly the size of a license plate on the windshield of its
workhorse, a Ford Excursion. “OUT-OF-SERVICE,” it read. “This motor
vehicle has been declared UNSERVICEABLE.”
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The
Excursion was a beast, a 10,000-pound SUV that had been chopped in half
and welded back together with 12 extra feet of carriage in the middle,
effectively turning it into a bus. It was a party vehicle, or a party
gag, the kind of limo that made you wince and check the leather seats
for stains. State inspectors knew Prestige’s Excursion well. They
regarded it as an insult to their profession and “violated” it whenever
they could.
The
Hussains always managed to get it back on the road. Six months earlier,
the limo had failed inspection for a long list of deficiencies,
including corroded and compromised brakes. Someone had crudely disabled
one of the lines with a vise grip. The Excursion’s regular driver, a
53-year-old named Scott Lisinicchia, knew the vehicle had problems and
preferred to operate Prestige’s other limousines. But on Saturday,
October 6, a little after 9 a.m., Lisinicchia got a call. Nauman Hussain
wanted him to take the Excursion out on a job. The windshield sticker
was gone.
At
1 p.m., Lisinicchia pulled the limo up to a home in the town of
Amsterdam. Axel Steenburg, a 29-year-old bodybuilder who worked at a
semiconductor plant, was organizing a 30th-birthday celebration for his
wife, Amy, and a big crew. Seventeen of them, including Amy’s three
sisters, Axel’s brother, and several other young couples, were going
day-drinking at Brewery Ommegang in Cooperstown, some 50 miles away. The
Steenburgs had figured that hiring a sober driver seemed like the safe
thing to do.
As
the celebrants piled into the Excursion, they found sickly neon-colored
lights, padded benches, and floorboards that had rusted through. One of
the partygoers texted a friend who had planned to attend but backed
out.
the limo sounds like it’s going to explode
yes haha it’s a junker literally
the motor is making everyone deaf ðŸ˜ðŸ˜ðŸ˜ðŸ˜
Lisinicchia
took an odd path to the brewery. Avoiding a direct route along the
highway, he embarked on a meandering course along small rural roads. It
might have seemed like an easier drive for the lumbering Excursion, now
carrying some 3,500 pounds of people, but the route’s steep hills and
frequent stops had the opposite effect, further stressing what remained
of the brakes. In back, the passengers could smell something burning.
By
1:45 p.m., the Excursion was south of Amsterdam in the rolling
Schoharie Valley, an hour from the brewery and heading in the opposite
direction. Lisinicchia drove hesitantly, as if he were trying to figure
something out. On Route 30, at the top of a hill, he shifted to the
breakdown lane.
A
Jeep came up from behind. Its driver, Holly Wood, a worker for the
county government, noticed the limo had its back-up lights on yet was
inching forward. “That’s weird,” she said to her daughter, who was
sitting shotgun. Wood turned down the radio, lowered the window, and
heard the bleat of the limo’s back-up alert. Through tinted windows, she
could see the passengers’ silhouettes. Lisinicchia was pointing toward
something in the distance. Wood passed the limo and drove on.
Behind
her, the Excursion kept rolling and began to pick up speed,
accelerating down a winding road that plunged almost 600 feet in less
than two miles. There was nowhere to pull off. Lisinicchia was pumping
the useless brake pedal so hard it deformed in the shape of his loafer.
At
the bottom of the hill, Route 30 terminates in a T-shaped intersection
with another state highway. Wood and her daughter sat there waiting to
turn. She looked in her rearview mirror and saw the 31-foot Excursion
hurtling directly toward them at as much as 118 miles per hour. The
sound in her ears was like a jet engine. Wood had enough time to tell
her daughter to hold on and then there was a white streak as Lisinicchia
swerved past and across the busy junction.
On
the far side of the road, in the parking lot of a country store, the
Excursion smashed into a stationary Toyota Highlander, launching the
4,000-pound SUV 80 feet. Standing nearby, two members of a family en
route to a wedding were crushed. Even after destroying the Highlander,
the Excursion was traveling at 80 miles per hour. It ended up in a
ditch, impaled upon itself, the engine bay all but flattened. From the
outside, the passenger compartment looked uncannily intact. Inside,
blunt-force trauma had instantly killed 16 people. Two more died within
hours. None of the passengers had been wearing seat belts, and their
bodies broke against the walls, the ceiling, and one another. The
carnage was so extreme that veteran paramedics attending the crash site
developed disabling mental-health issues.
Nauman
Hussain was informed about the crash by a call from a New York State
trooper. “Is this a prank?” he asked. Four days later, he was arrested
at a traffic stop outside Albany and charged with criminally negligent
homicide. News photographs from his arraignment show a muscular young
man in a black V-neck shadowed by his glowering older brother, Haris.
Among the items seized from Nauman’s Infiniti QX56 were a passport
application and a shredded piece of paper — the OUT-OF-SERVICE sticker
that had been glued to the windshield of the Excursion.
Nauman
posted bail, went home, and refunded $1,475 to Axel Steenburg’s credit
card. A few weeks later, he traveled to Kissimmee, Florida, for the 2018
Paintball World Cup at Gaylord Palms Resort & Convention Center,
where his team, the New York Xtreme, registered a disappointing 14th
place.
The Schoharie tragedy
was the deadliest transportation disaster in the U.S. in almost a
decade, including plane crashes. It was one of the worst single-car
wrecks in the history of the automobile, comparable only to accidents
involving buses or trucks that caught fire, sank, or fell off cliffs.
But the story would likely have faded from awareness, as car crashes
invariably do, if not for one factor: Nauman Hussain’s father, Shahed,
the owner of Prestige Limousine, was a longtime confidential informant
for the FBI and one of the most notorious operatives in the agency’s
history. In upstate New York, where a pair of federal terrorism
investigations had left Muslim communities seething and in despair, many
people gasped when they saw his name connected with the Schoharie
crash.
“It’s
this feeling that we’re cursed,” says Steve Downs, an Albany lawyer and
political activist. “Each time his name comes up, you say, ‘This is it.
We finally got to the end.’ But it just keeps coming back — this guy.”
Shahed Hussain undercover in 2003.
Photo: FBI / Department of Justice
The
impact of Hussain’s FBI cases was not confined to the region. They were
legal landmarks in the War on Terror, helping establish the legitimacy
of secret evidence, warrantless wiretapping, and the government’s
practice of inventing terror plots to entrap ordinary Americans with no
prior connection to violent Islamic groups. For this, the Hussain family
received hundreds of thousands of dollars, which helped them open and
operate several businesses around Albany. Prestige and the others racked
up safety violations, some of them egregious, yet were never shut down
by regulators.
“The
FBI enabled Shahed Hussain to feel that he could get away with
anything,” says Kathy Manley, an Albany attorney who has represented men
still serving multi-decade prison terms because of Hussain’s undercover
activities and who sees a connection between his anti-terror work and
the 20 dead in Schoharie. “He clearly didn’t care about the limousine
being unsafe, and apparently neither did his son.” The larger unanswered
question is whether anyone in government had helped the Hussains when
their businesses ran into trouble over the years. If they had, it would
make the government complicit in an unspeakable catastrophe. Few in
power are willing to discuss Shahed and Nauman Hussain. One of the
sources who did, when I began to call around last winter, speculated
that the family belongs to a class beyond the reach of law enforcement —
whose leverage confers something close to impunity.
From left, Shahed Hussain and his son Nauman. Photo: Courtesy of Amir Khan; Reuters/Cindy Schultz/Alamy.
If his story is to be
believed, Shahed Hussain arrived in Albany in 1994 as a political
refugee. With his wife, Yasmeen, and two boys, Nauman and Haris, Shahed
claimed to have fled sectarian conflict in Pakistan, with a scar he said
was proof — a mark on his wrist from being tortured in custody. There
were rumors in Albany’s Muslim community, however, that Hussain had come
to the U.S. to escape not oppression but a criminal investigation
involving a murder.
In
the Capital Region, the Hussains seemed to make a seamless transition
to upper-middle-class life, settling into mansion-lined Loudonville,
where Nauman and Haris attended one of the area’s top elementary
schools. Shahed, a nonstop talker with dark hair and an alligator grin,
came to own or operate several businesses, including a gas station and a
venture to import small consumer goods. A few months after the terror
attacks of September 11, 2001,
he was arrested as part of an identity-fraud ring. According to court
documents, the scam originated when Hussain had his driver’s license
taken away for failing to maintain one of his cars. After paying a
mechanic to falsify repairs, he persuaded a DMV clerk to clean up his
record. Soon, he was plying the clerk with cigarettes for illegal IDs,
mostly for other Urdu-speaking immigrants.
The
charges he faced were serious, with national-security implications:
Several of the 9/11 hijackers had used illegal licenses. Hussain was in
danger of being deported. But the FBI was desperate to discover
potential terrorists in the United States, and the agency offered him a
deal to become a confidential informant.
In
his new role, Hussain, who claimed to speak five languages, was
enthusiastic and effective. His FBI handler later testified that he was
“good at being deceptive,” adding, “like an actor — so he was presenting
a role, and he was very good at that.” His first targets were members
of his own identity-fraud scheme, including a girlfriend he testified
against; another case involved infiltrating an Afghan heroin ring.
Hussain’s personal life, though, was turning chaotic. He filed for
bankruptcy in the summer of 2003, and that October, a fire destroyed
most of the family’s home. The blaze nearly killed Yasmeen, who was
forced to jump out a window. FBI agents showed up at the scene, where
their informant was refusing to talk to investigators from the fire
department.
Hussain
was about to take on his most significant assignment yet. Based on
evidence recovered in Iraq, the government suspected the imam of an
Albany mosque, a Kurdish refugee named Yassin Aref, was a terrorist
commander. The FBI asked Hussain to wear a wire and engage Aref on the
subject of violence against America. Posing as “Malik,” a wealthy
importer of Chinese goods, Hussain began attending meetings at the
mosque. The congregation included a Bangladeshi pizzeria owner who was
in financial trouble, and Hussain offered him a $50,000 loan. He also
showed the man a surface-to-air missile. “But it’s not legal,” the
pizzeria owner said. “What is legal in this world?” Hussain replied.
When
it came time to transact the loan, the men agreed that a fellow Muslim
should serve as witness. Aref said yes to the task. At a fake office in a
dreary shopping plaza near Albany International Airport, with the FBI
watching through a camera hidden inside a clock, Hussain tried
unsuccessfully to get Aref to praise Osama bin Laden and condone suicide
bombing. He also made oblique references to a plot involving a missile,
but Aref, whose English was limited and who had never seen Hussain’s
supposed anti-aircraft weapon, ignored the remarks.
As
far as getting the men to participate in or endorse violence, the sting
was a bust. But that didn’t matter. Neither Aref nor the pizzeria owner
ever reported Hussain or his jihadi bombast to law enforcement. The
government deemed that this was itself an indication of wrongdoing. The
men had “failed” a “test,” as a prosecutor put it, and in 2004 the
Justice Department charged them with a range of crimes, including money
laundering in support of terrorism.
Steve
Downs, the Albany lawyer, read about Aref and came out of retirement to
join his defense. Downs had spent his career with the New York State
Commission on Judicial Conduct, investigating corrupt judges and
prosecutors. Their crookedness struck him as prosaic. “People were lazy,
they were sloppy, they didn’t care,” he says. “There was nothing
particularly shocking about it.” Aref’s prosecution, however, struck him
as desperate, vicious, and un-American. He regarded it as a criminal
act and one of the worst betrayals of public trust he had ever known.
“This was the first case I’d seen where the government prosecuted a man
they knew was innocent,” he says.
Aref’s
case outraged civil libertarians, not only for its reliance on
entrapment but for its use of secret evidence. Prosecutors presented
material that Aref’s lawyers were forbidden to see, let alone challenge.
(The New York Times reported that the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program
played a role in Aref’s arrest.) Even with such advantages, the case
almost collapsed. Prosecutors acknowledged that a crucial piece of
evidence had been mistranslated and that it referred to Aref not as commander but merely brother.
A federal judge reversed himself and granted the defendants bail.
“After one year’s undercover operation and surveillance, the government
and the FBI have come up with no real evidence that the men are
connected with terrorist groups,” he said.
Hussain
rescued the government at trial, where he was the prosecution’s star
witness. According to Kevin Luibrand, another defense lawyer, the
turning point came when Hussain, who arrived in court escorted by FBI
agents, testified that the defendants had shrugged when he told them
about an impending attack on New York City. There was no tape of the
alleged conversation — Hussain claimed he had dropped the recorder — but
the jury was shocked. Aref and the pizzeria owner were convicted and
sentenced to 15 years in prison.
The
FBI paid to relocate the Hussains to Memphis, Tennessee. They were no
longer welcome in Albany, where the Muslim community regarded Shahed
Hussain as “the lowest of God’s creations on earth,” according to
Shamshad Ahmad, a co-founder of the mosque where Aref had preached. With
$60,000 in compensation for his undercover work, Hussain resolved his
identity-fraud charges with a guilty plea and a fine of $100.
As in Russell Banks’s 1991 novel The Sweet Hereafter,
about a fatal school-bus accident in an upstate hamlet, the limo crash
seemed like a targeted demolition of a community — a cataclysm that
“wiped out nearly whole generations of some families,” according to the
Albany Times Union.
Afterward, the victims’ survivors were tortured by unanswerable
questions: Why didn’t the driver pull over sooner? When did the
passengers realize what was happening? Would such a death trap have been
on the road if its owner hadn’t been a precious government asset?
Shahed Hussain’s symbiosis with the FBI has been richly documented. There have been books, most notably The Terror Factory,
by Trevor Aaronson, as well as newspaper investigations, magazine
articles, and documentaries — plural. But as a rule, people in power
here will simply not discuss whether Hussain’s undercover work played
any role in allowing his businesses to flout safety regulations. Take,
for example, Democratic congressman Paul Tonko, a “son of Amsterdam” who
knew many of the victims. Last year, Tonko’s then–communications
director, Matt Sonneborn, began an hour-long interview by specifying
that neither he nor Tonko would have anything to say about the Hussains
or the FBI. Chris Tague, a genial Republican assemblyman from Schoharie,
burst into tears when I called. Like many in Schoharie, Tague has been
traumatized by the crash, but between sobs, he made it clear: The
Hussains and the FBI were a no-go area.
This
reticence is not prevalent outside Albany officialdom. On the contrary,
the first thing one learns about the Hussains is how obsessed people
are with them: lawyers, journalists, activists, members of the upstate
Muslim community. That makes sense, of course — the innermost circle of
hell is for traitors and snitches. But Shahed Hussain does not appear to
have been a typical snitch.
The Hussains did not
last long in Memphis before returning to Albany in 2006. That July, the
burned shell of the family’s former home was purchased for $450,000,
more than three times its former value. (The transaction is one of many
events in Hussain’s life that have never been fully explained. Property
records show a buyer with a Tennessee address that Hussain has also used
to conduct business. Investigators for the mortgage company have never
been able to locate the person, and the local newspaper reported that he
“appeared not to exist.”) Hussain used the windfall to purchase the
Hideaway Motel, an establishment near the Saratoga Springs racetrack. He
renamed the property the Crest Inn and shifted the business model,
renting squalid bungalows to low-income residents whose stays might be
paid for by the state. (Unsuspecting travelers would sometimes drift in
and leave withering reviews on Tripadvisor. “I’ve slept in mud and felt
less disgusting,” read one.)
Hussain
also went back to work for the FBI — this time with a new level of
responsibility and independence. Previously, the agency had selected his
marks; now it was his job to identify people who could be talked into
phony terror schemes. In 2008, he found a target-rich environment in
Newburgh, an enduringly poor city in the Hudson Valley that was home to a
large mosque, Masjid al-Ikhlas. Every Friday for more than a year,
Hussain would drive 90 minutes downstate, park outside the mosque in a
BMW or Hummer, and mingle after prayer with the congregants, some of
whom were low-level drug offenders rebuilding their lives after prison.
One
of these was David Williams, a soft-eyed 27-year-old who had recently
served time for drug possession. His mother, Elizabeth McWilliams,
remembers the day David introduced her to Hussain. “He said, ‘I want
your son to work for me in clothing distribution,’ ” McWilliams says.
Hussain, who was using the alias “Maqsood,” immediately made her
nervous: “We drove past a car and he said, ‘Look at them Jews. We should
kill them.’ I said, ‘How do you know they’re Jews?’ He said, ‘Don’t you
see the little curls?’ I said to David — excuse my French — ‘What kinda
motherfucker you got me in the car with?’ ” As she recalls the
incident, McWilliams, who is now 60, wears a cutoff T-shirt revealing
broad shoulders and cannonlike arms. She says she once told Hussain,
“There’s something about you, and when I put my finger on it, I’m gonna
let you know what it is.”
By
the time she did, it was too late. Hussain had enmeshed her son and
three other Black men in a scheme to blow up a military airplane and two
synagogues. None had terrorist connections or weapon-making abilities.
“These guys had absolutely no religious or political beliefs,” Kathy
Manley, who represented some of the men, says. “They weren’t even really
Muslim.” But the men had dim prospects. Williams was a part-time
college student, another was a stocker at Walmart, and one was a
homeless immigrant with severe mental illness. Hussain offered them a
BMW, a vacation, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they followed
along as he gave them what they thought were bombs and a Stinger
missile.
On
the night the FBI arrested Williams and his associates, agents raided
his mother’s apartment, kicking down her front door. “They came out in
helicopters, in gas masks,” she recalls. “I was on the toilet. I said,
‘You gonna let me wipe my ass?’ They was standing right there with a big
dog. So I wiped my butt, and I showed him the toilet paper so he could
see the shit on it. He turned around and then he took me in the room,
and he opened up the curtains and the light from the helicopter was
shining. I still didn’t know who they was and then I seen on his jacket,
HOMELAND SECURITY. And that’s when I said, I’m in some big shit.”
Evicted after the raid — the government refused to cover the damage to
her apartment — McWilliams found herself homeless, bathing in McDonald’s
bathrooms on the way to work.
FBI surveillance of the Newburgh sting; David Williams. Photo: Department of Justice; Robert Mecca/AP Images.
Her
son was charged with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction and
conspiracy to acquire and use anti-aircraft missiles. Just as in the
Albany case, the judge castigated the prosecution. “I believe beyond a
shadow of a doubt that there would have been no crime here, except the
government instigated it, planned it, and brought it to fruition,” said
Judge Colleen McMahon.
Hussain
testified for 13 days. Written up in the national press, his testimony
was the trial’s blockbuster centerpiece. He portrayed himself as a
swashbuckling operative who had worked more than 20 cases for the FBI.
Defense lawyers, eager to cast the government’s star witness as a
fabulist, subjected him to a brutal cross-examination. They argued
convincingly that Hussain had lied on his tax returns and immigration
papers and had even misled his FBI handlers. Hussain seemed incapable of
giving a straight answer. “Yes or no!” the judge shouted at him during
one exchange. “I’m tired of your playing games.”
These
aspersions faded after the jury reviewed the audio and video evidence
Hussain had compiled, which showed the defendants scouting locations to
fire shoulder-mounted missiles, spewing hatred about Jews, and
discussing what their code names should be. The Newburgh Four, as they
came to be known, were convicted in October 2010, setting a precedent
that in terrorism cases, citizens have little chance of succeeding with
an entrapment defense against the government.
David
Williams has spent much of the past 12 years in the Pollock Federal
Correctional Institution in Louisiana, often in solitary confinement.
The prison is nearly 2,000 miles from his family, who haven’t visited
since 2015. As Elizabeth McWilliams describes his ordeal, she begins to
shake violently and has to leave the room. “I never was a person that
thought about killing somebody,” she says quietly when she returns. “I
have that in me now. I feel like I could kill somebody. That’s why I
tell people I am not the person to mess with because, I swear to God, I
could kill somebody. I never felt like that. Because I used to speak to
my son every day. I could smell him. I could close my eyes, and that was
my child.”
Why was Shahed Hussain
doing this — adopting alter egos, concocting elaborate acts of
destruction, ruining lives? It wasn’t the threat of prison. After the
Albany case, the government had no more leverage on him. The next most
plausible incentive was financial. “We were convinced that Mr. Hussain
was a poor person who had extreme motive to lie for money,” says Mark
Gombiner, a lawyer for one of the Newburgh Four.
But
that wasn’t driving Hussain either. “In fact, he had huge amounts of
money available to him,” says Gombiner. The lawyers discovered during
the proceedings that Hussain had been receiving funds from Pakistan
since the mid-1990s — almost $700,000 in total. Much of the money went
through the Crest Inn. “There is money flowing in and out of this
deadbeat motel up in Saratoga Springs,” says Gombiner. “We don’t know
what it is. Maybe there is an innocent explanation, but it’s highly
suggestive of some sort of criminal activity, money laundering, some
attempt to disguise funds.”
At
the trial, Hussain claimed that he came from a rich family and that the
money had come from a trust fund and even in the form of a gift from
Benazir Bhutto, the late prime minister of Pakistan. This was seen at
the time as fabulizing. But it was not: Hussain indeed comes from a
prominent Pakistani family, one with ties to the highest levels of the
military and the intelligence service. His oldest brother, Malik Riaz
Hussain, is a billionaire and, in his country, a household name
synonymous with wealth and graft.
The
72-year-old Riaz (his third name is typically omitted) began his career
as a modest clerk, then became a military contractor. As the army
became the de facto ruler of the country, he leveraged an unparalleled
facility for bribery into one of the largest real-estate portfolios in
Asia. The alleged beneficiaries have included the son of the chief
justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan; in 2019, without admitting
guilt, he agreed to a settlement with the U.K.’s National Crime Agency
to hand over £190 million in assets (including a £50 million house
overlooking London’s Hyde Park) that authorities said might have been
obtained illegally. Britain has rescinded his visa, with a judge
writing, “Your exclusion from the U.K. is conducive to the public good
due to your conduct, character, and associations.” “He buys everything,”
says Ayesha Siddiqa, a prominent Pakistani scholar. “Judges,
politicians. No one is aboveboard as far as Malik Riaz is concerned. He
is institutionalized corruption.”
Malik Riaz.
Photo: Aamir Quershi / Getty Images
If
poverty and fear of incarceration are out as Hussain’s motives — what
then? There remains a simpler, darker explanation for his actions.
Delivering headline-generating terror convictions put the American
government in his debt and gave Hussain something priceless: a sense
that he did not have to answer to the law.
On
the witness stand in the Newburgh trial, he acknowledged a litany of
seemingly criminal acts, from tax evasion to bankruptcy fraud, much of
it committed while he was in danger of deportation. “He just sat up
there and smirked,” says Gombiner. Some found Hussain’s manner
unnerving. While many people would be distressed by the work of setting
someone up to commit a federal crime, he seemed to enjoy it. The jury
watched as he lounged with his targets on a safe-house couch and drove
around with them in his Hummer, making jokes.
Gombiner,
though, finds Hussain’s lack of compassion less troubling than the
conduct of the FBI and the prosecution, “who were so anxious to believe
they had found something.” He was shocked by the FBI agents’
credulousness. Perhaps the second-most-riveting testimony of the trial
came from Hussain’s handler, Robert Fuller. The special agent was part
of the FBI team that is considered to have missed opportunities to
thwart the 9/11 attacks. Hussain’s handiwork, in contrast, helped Fuller
seem like a hero. In front of the Newburgh jury, the agent theatrically
unzipped a canvas bag that contained what looked like a powerful bomb.
Hussain had helped the defendants plant the device, which was harmless,
at a synagogue in the Bronx.
Michael
German, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice who spent years
investigating terrorism for the FBI, told me that from the government’s
point of view, an informant who is deceptive and transactional is
neither unusual nor frowned upon. “Based on his documented criminal
history and success in recruiting people into sting operations, the FBI
clearly knew they were utilizing a talented manipulator,” German says of
Hussain.
As
Hussain’s mutually beneficial collaboration with the FBI continued, he
diversified his business interests around Albany. In 2012, he opened
Prestige Limousine. As recently as 2016, he was enjoying the FBI’s
favor. One day that year, Horayra Hossain, a 19-year-old cabdriver,
booked a room at the Crest Inn. His father, Mohammed, was the pizzeria
owner in the Albany entrapment scheme and had been in prison for ten
years. As Horayra was checking in, he recognized Shahed Hussain behind
the counter. He considered what to say, walked away, then returned.
“Do you know who I am?” Horayra asked.
Hussain smirked and said no.
“You
should remember me,” Horayra said. “It’s how you’re living lavish. I
wonder how you sleep at night.” He mentioned his father’s case.
Still
smirking, Hussain said he was mistaken. The confrontation was brief,
and Horayra left. A day later, he got a call from the FBI. He never
bothered Shahed Hussain again.
The Schoharie crash
was a major disaster — a level-D mass-casualty incident — and fell
under the jurisdiction of the National Transportation Safety Board. The
day after everyone died, October 7, 2018, a rapid-response NTSB “go
team” arrived, led by the agency’s chair, a courtly southerner and
former US Airways pilot named Robert L. Sumwalt. During his nearly 15
years at the agency, it had investigated plane crashes, bridge
collapses, boat sinkings, train derailments, and hot-air-balloon
mishaps. Widely praised for its scrupulous, above-the-fray independence,
the NTSB typically gets immediate, unfettered access to the scene of
any accident involving a vehicle. In Schoharie, a visibly shaken Sumwalt
gave a press conference — then discovered he had been frozen out of the
investigation.
The
New York State Police had taken charge. It moved the Excursion to its
headquarters, and for the next week, Sumwalt’s investigators were forced
to stand in a pen at a distance as troopers took it apart inside a tent
the NTSB had helped pay for. The agency took the extraordinary step of
going to the media to complain but even then gained little ground.
Publicly,
the person responsible for excluding the agency was Susan Mallery,
Schoharie County’s district attorney. Mallery, 54, whose father was DA
before her, presides over one of the smallest prosecutor’s offices in
the state, with a docket mainly of incidents along local roads. From the
beginning, Mallery was viewed as “overmatched,” says Casey Seiler, the
editor of the Times Union, and her battle with Sumwalt — in
which “the state police appeared to work with the DA to thwart the
NTSB,” as Seiler puts it — helped to create an atmosphere of secrecy and
mistrust. Why was the independent expertise of the premier
transportation-safety body in the U.S., if not the world, so unwanted?
Mallery
avoided the press. More than once when a reporter cornered her, she
resorted to hiding in her office. And she became especially unreachable
when word began to spread last spring that Nauman Hussain, facing 20
charges of criminally negligent homicide and second-degree manslaughter,
might never spend a day in prison.
Much
of what the community has learned about the incident has come from one
person: Larry Rulison, a baby-faced reporter for the Times Union.
Rulison primarily covered business, but on the Monday after the crash,
an editor asked him to field a call from a former employee of the New
York State Department of Transportation. The caller had the Excursion’s
DOT records, which showed a long history of mechanical trouble. Rulison
has since written more than 175 articles, many based on documents
exposing government agencies’ records of leniency toward the Hussains.
“I
like finding records,” he says. “It takes time. You have to drive to
the courthouse, and you have to know which door to go in. And then you
have to be nice. A lot of reporters are jerks.” Rulison’s obsessive
reporting — largely undertaken in the small hours, on his wife’s
computer in the family playroom, after filing his quota of regional
business dailies — has added layers of intrigue to the limo story.
“Larry goes down rabbit holes,” says Kevin Cushing, whose 31-year-old
son, Patrick, died in the Excursion. “And he gets rabbits.”
Rulison
solved one of the bigger mysteries of the case when he located Shahed
Hussain, who had gone missing, leaving Nauman to face the fallout from
the crash. It was thought that Shahed had traveled to Pakistan in the
middle of 2018, but when a family of some of the victims hired a process
server specializing in tracking down litigants abroad, the server came
up empty. From his basement, Rulison started searching Facebook “for,
like, literally every random picture from Lahore for hours and hours a
day,” he says. He eventually found a photo of Hussain in front of a
building there. (Hussain has never responded to any of Rulison’s
requests for comment, nor to mine.)
Rulison’s
reporting demonstrates a pattern: The Hussains compulsively ignore
rules and regulations, especially in matters of safety, yet never face
consequences. He believes it suggests help from high places. Take the
family hotel, he says, which was run by Haris Hussain, Nauman’s older
brother, and racked up code violations. Raw sewage flowed out of the
flimsy cabins into a muddy field. Electrical wiring and gas lines lay
exposed. There was $30,000 in unpaid property taxes. Somehow the hotel
wasn’t shuttered by tax collectors or health inspectors — not even after
a 5-year-old fell into an unsecured septic tank and nearly died, nor
after a fatal shooting on the premises. Only when the crash brought more
scrutiny on the Hussains was the hotel condemned.
Prestige
Limousine was an “outlaw limo company,” Rulison says. The Hussains
avoided a state rule mandating tougher inspections for extra-large
vehicles like the Excursion by falsifying reports, lying about its
alteration by listing its seating capacity as 11 one year, eight the
next, and ten the year after. Prestige never obtained operating
authority, a state requirement for certain businesses that transport
passengers. “When they got caught, they just blew it off and kept
operating,” Rulison says. The company disregarded state inquiries about
whether it drug-tested its drivers, as required by law, and its
out-of-service rate — how often inspectors deemed its vehicles unsafe to
drive — was 80 percent, more than 13 times the industry average. “Why
didn’t they just take the stupid keys away or the plates? No one ever
wanted to touch those guys,” says Rulison.
“Things
always seem to work in their favor,” he adds. “They get a lot of
mysterious breaks.” In 2014, Nauman and Haris Hussain were pulled over
on Interstate 787. According to the police, Haris, who was driving, had a
revoked license with 28 suspensions. Both were brought to a station
where officers learned that the brothers had been ticketed more than 70
times and that Haris had repeatedly used his brother’s identity to avoid
arrest. (Both Haris and Nauman go by multiple names. Nauman often uses
“Arslan” and “Shawn.”) This resulted in a first-degree felony charge of
aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle, but it was
eventually dropped. “The judge in the limo case said something like it
was the longest driving record he’d ever seen,” says Rulison. “It
bothered him. It bothers everyone. I have to wrestle it off me. It’s the
specter of something higher up. I just wonder if the treatment of
Shahed Hussain was because of his work with the government and if that
contributed to the crash. I always come up against people who said he’d
flaunt that he’s FBI and would be like, ‘Stay away from me. Don’t hassle
me. Don’t you know who I am?’ ”
Rulison
says he is sustained by calls from former state employees and other
knowledgeable sources wanting to discuss the crash. “Everyone would say
that this just doesn’t make any sense,” says Rulison. “These were
over-the-top violations.” As he pursued the Hussains, he began to feel
worse and worse. In the summer of 2019, the then-48-year-old father of
two checked into a hospital. His appendix had burst and sprayed a rare
malignant cancer all over his abdomen. He took two months off for a
procedure in which a surgeon used his fingers to peel tumors from
Rulison’s organs, then he resumed filing stories. Chemotherapy numbed
his fingers and addled his brain, but when he went to court, he found he
could face the families of the crash victims a little easier. “I was
like, ‘My life sucks right now too,’ ” he says.
Many
of the Schoharie families have spiraled. Rich Steenburg, who lost his
two sons, Axel and Rich Jr., was so destroyed by the crash that his
family didn’t realize he had suffered a series of strokes. “Now he
doesn’t remember having children,” says his former wife, Janet. “On the
days he does remember, it’s October 6, 2018, and he is just hearing of
the boys’ accident.” Beth Muldoon lost her son Adam Jackson and his
wife, Abby, and retired from her job to raise the couple’s two
daughters. Now 4 and 7 years old, the girls “lost their mom, their dad,
four aunts, and two uncles,” says Muldoon. “Also a godfather.” Just
before the crash, the Jacksons had moved into a house on the same block
as Muldoon. For a year afterward, she says, she had to drive around the
block in order not to pass her son’s house “because one of the girls
would freak out. She thought we were hiding her parents and wouldn’t let
her go see them. Or they’d see their cars in the driveway and say,
‘Mommy’s home! Daddy’s home!’ And then they would get really angry at
us.”
The
NTSB published its full report on the crash in fall 2020. It remains
the definitive statement on the disaster despite the difficulties agents
had accessing the scene. Addressing the public at an online hearing,
board members struggled to contain their fury. Much of it was directed
at the Department of Transportation, which knew Prestige was a threat —
the report counted 32 times the agency had interacted with the company —
and failed to act. But the deepest outrage was reserved for the
Hussains. “Prestige,” vice-chairman Bruce Landsberg said, his
face glowing red on the screen. “I can’t say enough negative about their
disregard for human life.”
A vigil for the Schoharie victims.
Photo: Cindy Schultz / Reuters/REUTERS
As the families waited
for the district attorney to prosecute Nauman Hussain criminally, they
considered their options for a civil lawsuit. The NTSB concluded that
the state’s “ineffective oversight of Prestige” had been a probable
cause of the deaths, but it is extremely hard to sue the government for a
disaster like the one in Schoharie. In 2005, in a similar case just 60
miles away, a tour boat on Lake George capsized on a clear day, killing
20 out of 47 passengers, most of them senior citizens. The NTSB placed
heavy blame on lax inspection requirements, but when victims’ families
sued, a court ruled that the state enjoyed governmental immunity.
Essentially, no matter how badly the people entrusted with protecting
the public screw up, their failure has no consequences.
That
left the dozen or so lawyers representing families of the Schoharie
victims searching for someone else to blame. The Hussains had taken out
an insurance policy on the Excursion, but it was for only $500,000, or
$25,000 per death. The Crest Inn was worth perhaps $1 million — again,
not much when split 20 ways. There was, however, a tantalizing target in
Malik Riaz, the billionaire relative. The Times Union helped
reveal that he had purchased the Crest Inn in 2010. The Hussains mixed
limo and hotel work by storing vehicles on the property and using its
address for both businesses, which prompted the Schoharie litigants to
name Riaz as a co-defendant in civil suits. The case is considered a
long shot. “Malik didn’t know anything about the operations,” one of his
lawyers says. In a deposition last year from Pakistan, where he lives,
Riaz said he rarely spoke to his brother and hadn’t seen him since the
limo crash.
Another
deep pocket materialized as the Schoharie district attorney looked into
Prestige’s records. Over the years, the Hussains often took the
Excursion to Mavis Discount Tire, a national chain, for inspections and
repairs. They shouldn’t have: The branch wasn’t authorized to inspect
vehicles that large. According to the DA, a Mavis manager admitted to
inaccurate billing practices, “where certain services were substituted
on invoices for ones actually performed,” including for work done on the
Excursion. Nauman Hussain had been billed for a brake repair that was
not performed as invoiced. Although the NTSB and a forensic investigator
hired by the state police separately concluded the limo had crashed
because of Prestige’s “egregious disregard for safety” and “neglect of
mandated commercial-vehicle inspections and maintenance,” the Mavis
disclosure turned the company into a target, one with the resources to
deliver substantial compensation to victims’ families. The chain was
recently acquired by a private-equity group for $6 billion. (Mavis
maintains that it “bears no legal responsibility for this tragedy and
the events that led up to it.”)
The
revelation also gave the Hussains, who had recently hired Joe Tacopina,
one of the most prominent defense lawyers in the U.S., a potential
escape from prosecution. As Casey Seiler said, “Mavis blows a hole in
the prosecution’s case.”
The criminal case against
Nauman Hussain concluded on a Thursday afternoon in early September.
Anticipating an angry and overflowing crowd, court officials converted
the Schoharie High School gym into a makeshift courthouse. A bomb squad
swept the locker rooms and the cafeteria, and police officers watched as
100 or so people filed in. The victims’ families, wearing sneakers,
T-shirts, and hoodies, occupied a space near a podium. The Hussain
entourage wheeled in smartly, shoes shined and cuts faded, escorted by a
pair of bodyguards. Nauman took his seat at the defense table and
stared at the parquet floor, flanked by Tacopina and his other lawyer,
Lee Kindlon, both wearing massive gold watches. Nauman’s girlfriend,
Melissa Bell, came in clutching a Louis Vuitton purse. Haris Hussain
slouched so far back in his folding chair it groaned.
Judge
George R. Bartlett III presided from a dais backed by championship
banners for wrestling and volleyball. “We are all here today hoping for
justice,” he told the courtroom. For almost three years, Bartlett had
presided without urgency, allowing repeated delays and doing little to
intercede in the dispute between local officials and the NTSB. Now he
held his head in his hands, wept, and pleaded with the victims’ families
to understand why he was allowing the district attorney to broker a
plea deal in which Nauman Hussain would serve zero days in prison.
“I
understand that many people, with good reason, feel the proposed
sentence here is way too light. Twenty people are dead. How could the
justice system even contemplate a sentence that does not impose decades
of incarceration?” said Bartlett, reading haltingly from a statement in a
tone that grew increasingly detached, as if the author were a mere
observer in his own courtroom. “I have given it many hours of thought.
It just does not seem right that 20 people are dead and the defendant
receives a sentence of probation and community service.”
Bartlett
turned to address the victims’ families directly, his voice coming over
the gym’s tinny PA explaining why he had accepted the plea agreement
the DA had brokered with the defense. Mavis had “weakened the district
attorney’s case,” he said. “The evidence shows that Mr. Hussain paid
Mavis for certain brake services, but such services were not described
or reflected accurately on the Mavis invoices.” According to the
agreement, Bartlett said, Hussain could not have foreseen the brake
failure. He did not address the likelihood that the limousine had lost
its stopping power because it was carrying so much passenger weight —
much of it illegal because of the way the Hussains had falsely
registered the vehicle. As for whether the Hussains bore any
responsibility for the tragedy by taking the Excursion to an unqualified
inspector, Bartlett said he simply deferred to the DA, who believed the
actions did not “constitute a gross deviation from the standard for
care that a reasonable person would observe.”
As
the judge read, the families, who had known a deal was brewing, did not
visibly react. When it was time for them to read victim-impact
statements, it was clear their tempers were boiling over. “You are still
a mass murderer,” John Schnurr, the brother of victim James Schnurr,
said to Nauman Hussain. “You’ve turned my life into a living hell, pure
torture,” said Kim Marie Bursese, mother of Savannah Bursese. “My life
has fallen apart, and I’m afraid I won’t be able to get it started
again,” said Kyle Ashton, the stepfather of Michael Ukaj. The statements
lasted three hours — a reminder of how many people had died.
Then
an extraordinary thing happened. Continuing his efforts to convince the
families that justice had been served, Bartlett told them what they
were getting instead of the punishment many said they desperately wanted
Nauman Hussain to receive. “By pleading guilty, the defendant will have
admitted his criminal negligence under oath,” he said. “Such will allow
this to be used in any civil action. Moreover, by pleading guilty, the
defendant no longer has a Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. Thus,
he can be compelled to testify in any civil actions.”
No
one in the gym needed it to be fleshed out. Bartlett had teed up Mavis,
which is now the focus of a number of lawsuits filed by the families.
“It’s a way of saying, ‘There’s no justice coming out of this courtroom.
If you want to get justice, go over there,’ ” says Kevin Luibrand, who
added that “in 38 years of practicing law, I’ve never seen anything like
that.”
Then
the proceedings ended. The Hussains sped off in a black SUV. They had
repeated the pattern again — acting in disregard for life and the law
but suffering scant consequences.
While
Tacopina expounded before TV cameras, I looked for Larry Rulison, who
had locked himself out of his car and was wandering around. Chemo, I
assumed. Rulison often said things like, “My brain isn’t right.” His
body doesn’t work well either — he holds on to the railings when he
climbs stairs — and I thought he might be struggling physically. But
when I found him, he was alone in downtown Schoharie, walking away from
the scene, distraught.
“I’m
shattered,” he told me. “I guess I have no idea how painful this has
been to those families. I thought I knew emotional pain. I thought
cancer was tough.” I offered him a ride, but he said he was going to
type up an account of the day on his phone, find someone to break into
his car, and drive home.
