Shahed Hussain, the FBI sting artist whose unsafe limousine cost the lives of 20 people

In today’s NY Times, there is a report on a limousine company that was responsible for the death of 20 people in upstate NY–the driver, 17 passengers and two pedestrians. The first paragraph: “A driver with an improper license. A limousine company with a trail of failed inspections and ties to a scheme to illegally obtain driver’s licenses. And a limousine that had also been deemed unsafe.”

We learn that owner of the limousine company was an FBI informant named Shahed Hussain who participated in stings and who was known to his victims as “Malik”.

Mr. Hussain, the man whose name seems to be associated with the limousine company, posed as a wealthy Muslim radical and was the central prosecution witness in a 2004 federal sting focusing on a pizzeria owner and an imam at an Albany mosque. Six years later, Mr. Hussain, who posed as a terrorist, played a key role in the government’s case in a plot to blow up two synagogues in the Bronx.

He became an F.B.I. informant after being charged in 2002 with a scheme that involved taking money to illegally help people in the Albany area get driver’s licenses.

Shahed Hussain first came to my attention in 2009 when I was compiling a dossier on FBI entrapment.

His first sting occurred in 2004 as mentioned above. I referred to a NY Times article from 2006 that identified Shahed Hussain’s role in Albany:

The New York Times, October 11, 2006
2 Albany Men Are Convicted In Missile Sting
By MICHAEL WILSON; Dennis Gaffney contributed reporting.

A federal jury on Tuesday convicted two Muslim immigrants of participating in a plot with a man who said he was helping plan a missile attack on a Pakistani diplomat in New York City in 2004.

The man to whom the immigrants were linked was actually an informant working with the F.B.I. in a sting operation against the two defendants, Yassin M. Aref, 36, an Iraqi refugee and the imam at an Albany mosque, and Mohammed M. Hossain, 51, a Bangladeshi immigrant and the owner of a pizzeria here. The gestation of the case, with the government’s informant ingratiating himself with the men and initiating all the conversations about a shoulder-fired rocket launcher, led to claims of entrapment from Mr. Hossain’s lawyers during the three-week trial in Federal District Court.

The case began when the undercover informant, Shahed Hussain, who used the name ”Malik,” introduced himself to Mr. Hossain at the Little Italy Pizzeria on Central Avenue in July 2003, bringing gifts for the restaurateur’s children, according to testimony. The two became friends, and the informant offered to lend Mr. Hossain $50,000 for improvements to the pizzeria. At later meetings, Mr. Hussain testified that he told Mr. Hossain that the money he was going to lend to him came from the sale of a missile launcher that would be used to kill a Pakistani diplomat in New York.

In reality, there never was a plot. In one meeting, captured on a video that was played at the trial, the informant showed Mr. Hossain a launcher. The restaurateur said he had only seen such a weapon on television, and he asked if it was legal, and the informant replied, ”What is legal in this world?”

This was not the last of Hussain’s dirty tricks. Three years later he conned four very marginal men into staging attacks on Jews that would help bolster the “war on terror” hysteria of those days. The NY Times reported on May 23, 2009:

The members of the mosque now believe that Maqsood was the government informant at the center of the case involving four men from Newburgh arrested and charged this week with having plotted to explode bombs at Jewish centers in New York City. The government has said that the four men, several of whom visited the mosque in Newburgh and all of whom spent time in prison, were eager to kill Jews, and prosecutors charged that they had actually gone so far as to plant what they believed to be bombs on the streets of New York, an act the F.B.I. captured on videotape.

It turns out that Maqsood was none other than the owner of the limousine company that now has the blood of 20 people on his hands:

The informant was not identified in court papers unsealed on Wednesday in Manhattan. But according to a person briefed on the case, the informant is Shahed Hussain, the central prosecution witness in a 2004 federal sting focusing on a pizzeria owner and an imam at an Albany mosque.

Lawyers for those men argued that Mr. Hussain, who had posed as a wealthy Muslim radical, had entrapped their clients in an ultimately fictional plot to kill a Pakistani diplomat with a missile. But a federal jury convicted the two men, and they were sentenced to 15 years in prison.

HBO made a very good documentary about the second sting that I reviewed in 2014. I stated:

Five years ago I posted a Dossier on FBI entrapment in “war on terror” prompted by what had happened to four men in Newburgh who were arrested by the FBI for their alleged role in a plot to attack Riverdale synagogues and fire a missile at airplanes on the Stewart Air Force base tarmac. The NY Times displayed some skepticism about the arrest. An FBI agent provocateur had no luck recruiting men from a local mosque who regarded him as suspicious. Instead he approached someone who had only a fleeting connection to the mosque and who was more interested in a quick buck than in jihad. In claiming that the four men were Islamic terrorists, the District Attorney did not let the facts get in the way:

Law enforcement officials initially said the four men were Muslims, but their religious backgrounds remained uncertain Thursday. Mr. Payen reported himself to be Catholic during his 15-month prison sentence that ended in 2005, according to a state corrections official. Mr. Cromitie and Onta Williams both identified themselves as Baptists in prison records, although Mr. Cromitie changed his listed religion to Muslim upon his last two incarcerations; David Williams reported no religious affiliation.

Now, five years after their arrest and five years into their 25-year sentences, HBO has begun airing a documentary titled “The Newburgh Sting” that is both a stunning exposé of the entrapment but a timely warning to all people involved in social struggles to maintain a watchful eye against those who urge “more revolutionary” actions such as planting bombs. From the looks of things, they are likely to be FBI operatives.

Much of the film consists of footage that was recorded by hidden FBI cameras to make its case. There is something both pathetic and comic about the discussions that take place between the “brains” behind the conspiracy and his unwitting dupes. Sadly, the four men, who are not very bright, show little appetite for killing anybody and are far more interested in talking about what they are going to do with the money they make. As happens universally in such cases, there was less than a zero possibility that any of them would have gotten involved in such a plot if the FBI had not set the gears in motion, particularly a Haitian youth who was barely capable of taking care of himself even if he had a bankroll. The NY Times reported:

Payen, described as a nervous, quiet sort who took medication for schizophrenia or a bi-polar disorder, was unemployed and living in squalor in Newburgh. His last arrest, in 2002, was for assault, after he drove around the Rockland County village of Monsey, firing a BB gun out of the window — striking two teens — and snatching two purses. A friend who visited Mr. Payen’s apartment on Thursday said it contained bottles of urine, and raw chicken on the stovetop.

For those of you who are HBO subscribers, you are probably aware that it has supplanted PBS as a primary source of cutting edge documentaries. It broke the story on the West Memphis Satanic Cult miscarriage of justice and is continuing in that vein with “The Newburgh Sting”.

Fortunately, you can now see the HBO documentary on YouTube:

I hope some radical filmmaker can make a new film that connects the dots between this scumbag’s entrapment operations and his homicidal limousine business. It will illustrate how FBI stings and wanton disregard for safety regulations are driven by the same deadly logic that puts the national security state and the sorry state of consumer protection on the same footing.

Mike Vanderboegh: portrait of an agent-provocateur

A former Marxist? Hardly.

Four years ago Mother Jones published an article on Mike Vanderboegh, the ultrarightist who has been falsely associated with the armed occupation of buildings in a bird sanctuary in Oregon, that referred to his leftist past:

Fiery rhetoric about resistance and revolution isn’t new for Vanderboegh, though the origins of his activism may seem a bit incongruous. “I used to be a communist,” he says. Vanderboegh, who is in his late 50s, claims he joined the anti-war movement in 1967, first with Students for a Democratic Society, then the Socialist Workers Party, and eventually the Maoist Progressive Labor Party.

Vanderboegh says his days as a left-wing radical came to an end in 1977. At the time, he was working as an aide in an Ohio hospital and an ex-Wehrmacht surgeon being treated there “wrestle[d] the devil for my soul.” “Herr Doktor,” as Vanderboegh called him, gave him a copy of Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, a 1944 tome that is one of the intellectual pillars of libertarianism. Through Hayek and some tutoring from Herr Doktor on the evils of communism, Vanderboegh says, he saw the light and gave up the class struggle and even politics in general—at least for a while.

I don’t have much interest in the man’s involvement with the Burns, Oregon action but I am interested in the allegation that he once belonged to the SWP, a group I spent 11 years in. Vanderboegh’s “conversion” is recounted in a post on Sipsey Street Irregulars, a blog that describes itself as “The ORIGINAL gathering place for a merry band of Three Percenters. (As denounced by Bill Clinton on CNN!)”.

I can understand the progression from SDS into the SWP, a path followed by many as the New Left degenerated into Weatherman type antics. But hardly anybody ever went from the SWP to the PLP, unless it was Arne Swabeck, the octogenarian who became a Maoist in the 1960s after decades in the Trotskyist movement. In fact my first SWP meeting in NYC took up his expulsion.

But check out what Vanderboegh says about his work with the PLP:

Toward the end, I became a member of the PLP’s “secret party,” dropped from public view and on instructions began to organize a “worker’s militia” in central Ohio. We’d start out vetting new members by having them break into National Guard armory parking lots and slash vehicle tires. In the end, we’d rob dope dealers to raise the money to buy weapons, all kinds of weapons. We were very good at what we did. And very, very lucky. Don’t believe me? Most of my “Benedict Arnold” period papers are part of a collection at the Ohio Historical Society. Look it up. You can look up the statute of limitations too. Nobody died. Like I said, we were very, very lucky.

This sounds like utter bullshit to me. If you know anything about the PLP, you know that the last thing they would be up to is robbing dope dealers or slashing tires in National Guard armory parking lots. Most likely, a PLP member would be selling their unreadable newspaper in front of plant gates, the same kind of activity that the SWP would eventually take up. The PLP was a workerist sect that was involved with some major campus struggles such as the San Francisco State student strike of 1968. But its working class intervention was pretty focused on “serving the people” trade union organizing that was anything but adventuristic. In Boston, they were focused on getting their members into the GE plant in Lynn or into the local hospitals.

Basically Vanderburgh sounds like he is telling tales or more ominously had conned some inexperienced PLP members into what looked like the typical FBI entrapment. I remember an invitation from a guy in NYC to take part in similar dubious activities. We knew him as Carl “Mustafa” Jones, an African-American who showed up at our upper west side HQ one afternoon. He told us that he was an ex-con who was at Attica during the rebellion. He was serving time for robbing drug dealers—the same story told by Vanderboegh. After a few weeks of coming to Friday night forums, Jones sat down with the branch organizer and me to invite us to come to a firing range where “revolutionaries” were preparing for armed struggle. At that point we began to have our doubts.

Finally, on his “Benedict Arnold” period at the Ohio Historical Society. I just got off the phone with the librarian there and she told me that the box contains nothing but pamphlets, buttons, leaflets, newspapers, posters, etc. and not a single thing he produced. I was interested in any of his personal correspondence since that would give me some clues into his likely agent-provocateur past. Since there was none, I had to assume that he joined leftist groups without even a modicum of familiarity with socialist politics that allowed Ed Heisler, another FBI informant, to end up on the SWP national committee.