Sunday, June 1, 2008

Inside a case against 2 men who sold arms

Last spring, while flying in custody from Romania to New York, a Syrian arms dealer named Tareq Mousa al-Ghazi turned to the American agent sitting next to him on the plane and asked why he had just been arrested. The agent told Mr. Ghazi that the United States government was, in fact, interested in one of his business partners, court papers say: a wealthier and much more prolific arms dealer named Monzer al-Kassar.

Mr. Ghazi, 62, had told the agent that more than a decade had passed since he had had dealings with Mr. Kassar when the agent asked whether he was familiar with the works of Shakespeare — "Julius Caesar," in particular, the papers say, wherein Marc Antony states, "The evil that men do lives after them."

Not many investigations can boast of a Shakespeare-quoting federal agent; then again, not many investigations are as intricate as the Drug Enforcement Administration's three-year pursuit of Mr. Ghazi and Mr. Kassar, who are being prosecuted in federal court in Manhattan.

The evil that the agent was alluding to, the government says, was Mr. Ghazi's 20-year relationship with Mr. Kassar, a bond that started in a Polish safe house in the 1980s and continued through a series of arms deals in Hungary, the Czech Republic and Yemen, many on behalf of Palestinian terror groups, investigators say.

The friendship eventually led to a sprawling sting investigation in which the D.E.A. claims to have caught the men trying to ship millions of dollars of rifles, pistols, grenade launchers and shoulder-fired rockets on a Greek freighter bound from Romania to Suriname for members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

Before his arrest in the case last June at Madrid Barajas International Airport, Mr. Kassar, also 62, was a vastly successful weapons dealer, a wanted man for more than 30 years and a globe-trotting criminal, investigators say, who played roles in the Iran-contra affair, the Achille Lauro hijacking and the Iraqi insurgency. His arrest in Spain was the capstone of the investigation, which ended with an indictment last June in New York charging him in a plot to ship the weapons to guerrillas in Colombia seeking to kill American forces there on anti-drug missions.

Mr. Ghazi was also charged in that indictment, accused of acting as Mr. Kassar's chief partner and logistical expert. While his lawyers claim that he was drawn into the plot unwittingly and by a D.E.A. operative who used him only to get to Mr. Kassar, the government has laid out his involvement in the case in a series of previously undisclosed papers, which, in essence, provide an anatomy of the deal the two men are accused of setting up.

The story begins in May 2005, in southern Lebanon, where, according to papers filed by his own lawyer, Mr. Ghazi was living peaceably with his wife, Amal, selling religious trinkets on the street. One day, a man claiming to be "a wealthy businessman" arrived at his home wearing handsome clothing and smoking an expensive cigar.

Though the man told Mr. Ghazi he had contacts in the Palestine Liberation Front, a terror group that Mr. Ghazi once belonged to, he was, in fact, an undercover agent for the D.E.A. known in the papers only as Samir.

For months, the defense papers say, Samir engaged Mr. Ghazi in pleasantries at restaurants where Mr. Ghazi eventually made some startling admissions.

According to the government's papers, he told Samir that he had once helped Abu Abbas, leader of the Palestine Liberation Front, escape on a private jet from Yugoslavia after the group had hijacked the Italian cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, in 1985. Mr. Ghazi also told Samir that he and an associate once planned to murder the president of Egypt, Anwar el-Sadat, in the Ivory Coast, the government claims. (Mr. Ghazi's lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, said that Mr. Ghazi was a member of the group but that he never played a role in its terrorist operations.)

Slowly, the government's papers show, the conversations turned toward Mr. Kassar, who for many years had been living in a seaside palazzo in Marbella, Spain. Samir had a deal, the papers say — the sale of 1,000 rifles to an unnamed customer in the Ivory Coast — which he thought might benefit from Mr. Kassar's participation. According to his lawyer's papers, Mr. Ghazi hesitated, telling Samir that he and Mr. Kassar were no longer friends and that he had no intention of doing business with him anymore. And yet after "much pressure," the defense papers say, Mr. Ghazi called Mr. Kassar and eventually the three men met, on Dec. 28, 2006, in southern Lebanon.

Mr. Kassar was not a man to trifle with, investigators say. His earliest arrest was in the 1960s, for stealing cars in Syria. He was also a hashish dealer who, according to the United States government, eventually sold arms in Nicaragua, Brazil, Cyprus, Bosnia, Croatia, Somalia and Iran. In 1995, he was tried — and acquitted — in Spain on charges relating to the Achille Lauro hijacking and, five years later, was indicted in Argentina on charges of obtaining false passports.

Directly in advance of the American invasion of Iraq, he sold night-vision goggles and bulletproof vests to the Iraqi Army, the United States attorney's office in Manhattan says. Prosecutors also claim in filings that he personally helped Saddam Hussein and his cronies spirit nearly $1 billion out of Iraq on a private plane just before the war began.

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