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Description
On a spring day in 1999, Detective Sergeant Fromme of the Iredell County, North Carolina, Sheriff's Office thought that what the two FBI agents sitting across from him at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Charlotte had just told him was something right out of a Hollywood script. Moreover, he had mixed feelings about the disclosure. On the one hand, the agents confirmed something he had long suspected: there was much more to the group of Lebanese cigarette smugglers he had spent the last several years investigating than mere criminal activity. On the other hand, with his case ready for indictment, Detective Fromme feared that the long, painstaking investigation he had conducted alongside the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) was about to be hijacked by the FBI in the name of national security.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The agents' startling information revealed that the suspects in Detective Fromme's cigarette-smuggling case were members of Hizballah, an international terrorist organization responsible for the deaths of more Americans than any other terrorist group in the world prior to September 11, 2001. (1) When he learned this, Detective Fromme knew that the investigation was about to take on a life of its own. (2)
The Cell
In 1992, Mohamad Youssef Hammoud arrived in New York City using a fraudulent visa. Over time, the FBI determined that Hammoud and several of his relatives were members of, affiliated with, or sympathetic toward Hizballah. These individuals also participated in an ongoing pattern of relatively low-level criminal activity that ranged from fraud (e.g., immigration, marriage, credit card, and identity) to money laundering (e.g., cigarette smuggling). The information developed by the FBI augmented and, in some cases, mirrored that from the criminal investigation of cigarette-smuggling activities conducted by Detective Fromme and the ATF.
According to FBI Special Agent Schwein, who conducted much of the FBI's investigation, Hammoud and the other cell members were "part-time terrorists and full-time criminals." (3) The criminality of Hammoud and his confederates ultimately became their greatest vulnerability and allowed investigators to painstakingly unravel a criminal enterprise inexorably tied to terrorism, specifically fund-raising and procurement activities directed by and conducted on behalf of Hizballah. "The case opens an important window on the small but worrisome subculture of militant Islamic... |
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