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To my mother.

Everything I am and ever will be is because of you.

Rest in peace, Mom.

GLOSSARY OF ARABIC WORDS

munafiq (singular)/munafiqeen (plural): an outward Muslim who is secretly unsympathetic and undermines the Islamic community

NOTE TO THE READER

American Radical is the story of a group of extraordinary men and women whom I was lucky enough to work alongside for the past nine years and the human toll and sacrifice we make to do the job every day.

Only the first names of the actual agents are used. I do this to protect them from harm by enemies of the United States. I refer to publicly recognized senior agents and FBI management by their true names. I have taken great care to avoid going into specific detail about training, tactics, and procedures used by the FBI and law enforcement.

My intent in writing this book is to ensure that the content gives a clear and accurate account of the events and experiences in which I took part, but it is of paramount importance to me that I maintain the sanctity and secrecy of operational and security issues.

The majority of the material contained within this book was derived from reports and transcripts generated during the investigation. When no documents were available, scenes were reconstructed from my notes and memory. This book is my perception of what happened and when it happened. If there are inaccuracies in it, the responsibility is mine.

This book was reviewed and approved by the FBI, but it presents my views and does not represent the views of the FBI, the U.S. Department of Justice, or anyone else.

CHAPTER 1

Super High

I WAS RICO Jordan before I was Tamer Elnoury. Hell, I was a lot of people before I ever got in front of a terrorist. I spent a lot of days looking and acting like a criminal. I had a knack for being able to relate to people. To pull them in and make them feel comfortable, even drug dealers.

I STEPPED IN front of the mirror and smoothed out my thick mustache and goatee that grew six or seven inches off my chin. Two hoop earnings went into my left ear. I tucked my baggy pants into my black Timberland boots and slid a pistol between my waistband and the small of my back.

It was close to 6:00 P.M. on September 10, 2001. I was working narcotics in New Jersey, so most of my days started when everyone else was headed home. For months, I’d been looking for the distributor of Super High, a potent batch of heroin coming out of New York. When Super High hit the streets, overdoses skyrocketed.

My target was Kit Kat’s crew. She and her two sons ran a network of dealers working the towns and cities in central New Jersey. After months of buying from them, they agreed to let me meet their Super High source. The supplier’s street name was Black. We’d heard of him, but we’d never gotten eyes on him. That was my job. Identify him and wait for the SWAT team to make the arrest.

Traffic was thick with the bridge-and-tunnel crowd coming home. Kit Kat’s crew worked out of a row house at the end of an alley with lookouts positioned on the roof. I parked my green Mazda 626 behind the house after circling the block a few times. Most drug dealers will make a couple of passes to make sure the block isn’t hot, and I needed to look the part. It also let me relay information back to the waiting SWAT team. While I drove, I narrated what I saw into a Nokia cell phone.

Billy, my sergeant, was on the other end of the line. He passed each mental picture back to the staging location, a makeshift command center. At the mouth of the alley, I saw the spotters on the roof watching me. With each step, everything slowed in my mind. I’d come a long way since my first drug buy three years ago.

My first buy was for “dip”—shards of crack cocaine chipped off a bigger rock. My hands were sweating as I approached the dealer. I pressed a twenty-dollar bill into his hand and waited for him to fish out a shard from a plastic bag. I was anxious. I couldn’t catch my breath. My fingers tingled with adrenaline. I probably looked like a junkie. The dealer put the shard into my hand. I barely felt it as I ran back to the undercover car.

I held out my hand. The dip was just a smear. The rock melted in my sweaty hands.

I didn’t know. I found out later the dealer had an enormous eagle tattoo on his neck. I was so full of nerves and fear I missed everything. It was embarrassing.

After that, I started to study. I found a junkie who taught me how to cook crack, cut heroin and cocaine. But the biggest lesson was the power of addiction. Just the thought of getting high aroused him. He carried a razor blade in his pocket. If he got arrested, he sliced up his leg through his pants and poured heroin into the wound. It was the only way to stave off withdrawal in jail. Rico Jordan was born out of those meetings. There was no respect in the drug world for a user. I had to be a dealer.

The key to a good cover story was keeping it close to your own experiences. I was a college graduate, so Rico Jordan had a few credits but no degree. He was a former business major—like me—who’d turned entrepreneur drug dealer. Rico Jordan was all business, which earned respect on the street and avoided the hassle of explaining why I wasn’t using.

I’d been Rico Jordan for about a year and a half. People didn’t know if I was Hispanic, light-skinned black, or Middle Eastern. All they knew was that I wasn’t white. I didn’t earn a second glance in the neighborhood.

A guy near the front of the alley—security—was sagging to the left as I approached. He likely had a gun on his right hip. He nodded to me as I passed. Kit Kat’s crew knew me and I was ushered into the house.

I’d been in the house before, so I knew the way. The house stunk like feet. Weed smoke hung in the air. The TV was on, but no one was watching it. About a half dozen men were too busy joking, talking, and smoking. No one acknowledged me as I walked into the dining room.

Two men—one of the guys was part of the crew—looked up. Money was being counted on the table. Glassine bags of heroin were piled in the middle. One of the guys had a bulge—likely a pistol—in his waistband. They kept talking.

I took a snapshot of each room. This wasn’t about protecting the SWAT team any longer. This was self-preservation. If the deal went south, I knew my escape route and each room’s biggest threats.

G-Money was leaning against the counter. I have no idea how he got the nickname. Probably because he thought it sounded cool. He was scrawny with short-cropped hair. I never saw him in anything but a FUBU shirt or a baggy sweatshirt and jeans.

I looked around the kitchen. No one used it to make food. The counter was grimy and sticky. The sink stunk of stale beer.

“You’re good people,” G-Money said. “Don’t forget me when you start moving up.”

“If you buy twenty bricks, he’ll knock it down,” he said. “Just get to know him first.”

Heroin is packaged into bags or decks, bundles, and bricks. In New Jersey, a brick of heroin is five bundles, or fifty bags. The street value of a bag of heroin is about ten dollars. I wanted a bulk discount.

I heard Black’s Acura pull up outside the back door. I could see the car’s rims and spinners from the window. He grabbed a black gym bag out of the back seat. G-Money greeted him with a handshake that turned into a hug.

Black was tall and thin with skin so dark it looked like it hurt. He had baggy black jeans that he had to constantly pull up over his ass. Black wore his tan Timberland boots untied. A comically large gold medallion hung around his neck. When he got to me, we shook hands.

Black’s face changed. His hands went to his sides as he eyeballed me, skeptical of what he’d just been told. The look startled me. Did he know me? Had he seen me somewhere? Had he made me as a cop? The mental pictures started flicking through my head. Threats. Escape routes. Seconds started to drag. Then he smiled.

G-Money had a big smile on his face. It was the best possible ice-breaker. Before we could get to business, Kit Kat staggered into the kitchen. She walked like a sailor on deck in a storm. She smiled at Black and then hugged me. I could feel her skeletal body against mine.

My luck was getting better and better. I could see Black checking us out as the matriarch of the family was hugging me. G-Money was making jokes about my name. Black was relaxing.

There were seventy-five cops staged around the house. Everyone was waiting for him to open the bag. This part always got my heart racing. He unzipped the bag and I looked at the bricks of heroin. A calm came over me. We had him.

“Let me grab a couple of bricks now,” I said. “I’ll get the rest later.”

I had money to buy twenty bricks. Once we made the deal, his charge went from possession with intent to distribute to distribution in a school zone. An elementary school was only a block or two away.

He stacked the bricks on the kitchen counter. My heart started to race again, because I knew when I gave the word, SWAT was going to hit the house.

“Want to give me your number?” I said. “I’ll hit you up later for the rest.”

Every operation had a takedown word and a distress signal. The distress signal meant “Come and get me, I’m in trouble.” The take-down word signaled “The deal is done. Take it down.” This operation’s takedown word was “soft pretzel.”

“Man, you guys eat yet?” I said. “I missed lunch. All I had to eat today was a soft pretzel.”

Black didn’t answer. He just gave me his mobile number. I put it in my phone while Black and G-Money made small talk. Black started to pack up.

The spotters saw SWAT coming. Everybody stopped. Fight or flight took hold. G-Money and one of the guys in the dining room bolted for the back door. Black froze. His eyes darted back and forth as his mind tried to figure out his next move.

I pressed my back against the refrigerator. My eyeballs went to Black’s hands and waist. If he went for a gun, I was going to shoot him.

Black’s mind finally engaged. He grabbed the gym bag and went out the back door. SWAT officers with MP5 submachine guns met him on the steps. He came barreling back into the kitchen and tossed the bag as soon as he got inside. The heroin went everywhere.

Twelve seconds of yelling. Furniture breaking. Chaos. One of the guys in the dining room got slammed on the table, shattering it.

I knew Bobby, one of my closest friends, was coming for me. A few hours before the operation, I briefed the team dressed as Rico Jordan. That was common practice so that everyone knew what I was wearing. It was an officer safety thing.

“I’m going to put the cuffs on him this time,” Bobby said during the briefing.

Bobby was Jewish. I am Muslim. I called him “Jew Boy.” He called me “Camel Boy.” The unit nicknamed our corner of the office the Gaza Strip. Political correctness had no place in our office. Every day was about the mission and the brotherhood in that order.

I could hear Bobby yelling at suspects to get down. His voice got louder and louder. Bobby hit the kitchen at a sprint. He was headed for me.

I stepped to one side and bitch-slapped him. The crack of my hand hitting his face cut through the chaos. Everyone stopped for a second. I tried not to laugh just as hands grabbed me and slammed me to the ground.

I covered my head as Bobby and the guys flipped me on my face and cuffed my hands behind my back. You don’t hit a cop without getting your ass beat, and I took a few slaps too. But it was worth it to see my handprint on Bobby’s face a few hours later.

Bobby took me out to a waiting car. I could see the guys from the living room lined up along the wall. Everyone had their heads down. At the police station, Bobby took me in the back door. Billy, my sergeant, met me at processing. He dressed in old faded jeans and white Reebok sneakers. His disheveled brown hair needed a comb. When he was doing undercover drug work, we called him Charles Manson because of his long brown hair and thick beard.

I nodded. We spent about an hour going over the buy. It turned out to be a huge hit. We flipped some informants and found the source of Super High in Spanish Harlem. We also broke up Kit Kat’s drug ring. After the briefing, Billy led me to a cell where they held the others.

A sheriff’s deputy escorted me out of the cell. Right after we were out of sight, the cuffs were off.

“Just because I’m going home doesn’t mean I won’t get those overtime hours,” I said.

“You’ll get it. Get some rest,” Billy said. “You’ve got that crack buy in the morning.”

CHAPTER 2

I Am a Muslim

It was before 8:00 A.M. on September 11, 2001. The weather was perfect. Not hot, but not cool yet. The only hint of fall was football dominating the morning sports talk. Week one was over. My Bills dropped the season opener to the Saints, but it was week one. There was still hope.

I was tired as I drove my Mazda to the buy. Even though Billy cut me loose early, it still took me hours to come down. When I finally got to sleep, the alarm went off. I dragged myself to work, praying for a weekend.

I parked my car after doing a lap around the block. My spotter, James, was set up across the street as I approached the dealer. He was a young black guy. A low-level guy. He was just a cog in the machine. The start of a thread that hopefully led to his supplier.

The crack buy was routine. Money and drugs exchanged in one fluid motion. The dealer was chatty. I wasn’t interested in talking about the weather or if the Seattle Mariners, on their way to winning more than one hundred games, would challenge the Yankees when the playoffs started next month. But sports turned to current events before I walked away.

“Yo, did you hear some drunk guy just flew a Cessna into the World Trade Center?” he said.

I didn’t believe it. A drug dealer wasn’t the most reliable source unless you were looking to score. I got back into my car and tossed the drugs onto the passenger seat. I tuned the radio to a news station. Initial reports had a Cessna striking the north tower at 8:46 A.M., a few minutes before I made the buy.

As I drove back to the office, details started to come in about the plane. It wasn’t a Cessna. It was American Airlines Flight 11. The Boeing 767 aircraft had left Boston’s Logan Airport headed for Los Angeles. I’d learn later that Mohammed Atta and four other hijackers took control and flew it into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. There were eleven crew members and seventy-six passengers on board.

I got back to the office just as United Airlines Flight 175, a Boeing 767 with a crew of nine and fifty-one passengers, hit the South Tower. I ran into the conference room. Guys from the unit were watching the news on a TV in the corner. A stunned silence hung over the room as the footage of the plane hitting the South Tower was replayed. The pit in my stomach grew each time I saw the plumes of smoke and fire shoot out of the towers.

AMERICAN AIRLINES FLIGHT 77, a Boeing 757 aircraft, with a crew of six and fifty-three passengers, crashed into the Pentagon thirty minutes later.

Oh God, please don’t let this be a terrorist attack, I thought. That’s how naive I was at the time, how naive many of us were.

My cell phone rang. It was my girlfriend. She was crying. Our mutual friend was trapped in the South Tower. He was a few floors above the damage and called his wife. She could hear the sirens in the background as he tried to reassure her.

“I love you,” he told his wife. “I don’t know what is happening. We’re going to try and get out now. Don’t worry about me. Take care of you.”

That was the last time they talked. Everybody in the office was getting the same kinds of calls. The first reports about al Qaeda shook me out of my stupor. Images of Osama bin Laden in his military field jacket firing an AK-47 filled the TV screen. Then news broke that the hijackers were all Arab Muslims. All of a sudden my religion was front and center. The hijackers had killed thousands of innocents in the name of the most precious and private thing in my life. My gaze was fixed on the TV, but my mind was back in Egypt.

I was born in Alexandria. I arrived in New Jersey in 1977. My father was looking for a better life, so he packed up his wife and two kids and flew three thousand miles to a foreign country. Even at four years old, moving to the United States was a culture shock. My preschool teacher called home after the first week with a good report.

“He is doing well,” she told my mother. “He is very talkative. He is a good little boy. But no one has any idea what he is saying.”

My father was a medical engineer, but his first American jobs were modest. He pumped gas and worked in a chocolate factory and as a security guard on a department store’s graveyard shift. My mother was a chemist. She worked side jobs before getting a job at a chemical company that made fabric dyes. She was lucky. It took my father six years to get a job designing orthopedic implants. His claim to fame was Bo Jackson’s hip. Each passing year my family got wealthier. When my father bought a house with a pool in North Jersey, we knew we had settled into the American dream.

Being Muslim in America in the 1980s wasn’t a big deal. We lived across the street from a church. A synagogue sat behind our house. I had sleepovers at my Jewish friends’ houses. Most people thought I was Hispanic. But at home, my mother only spoke Arabic to me. She never wanted me to lose my culture or religion.

Islam was something I practiced privately. My mother made sure I studied the Quran and made Islam a daily part of my life. I still strive to say my prayers every day. Do I miss a day? Yes. Have I missed fasting during Ramadan? Sure. I’m no different from Catholics who go to church only on Christmas and Easter. That doesn’t make me less religious. It just makes me a human who, at the end of the day, is a Muslim.

It was a trip to the mosque with my father that set me on my path. I was in college, struggling to get a degree in business. The prospect of being chained to a desk in a cubicle farm made my skin crawl. My favorite college class was an introduction to criminal justice. I knew it would be a hard sell to my parents. They’d accept lawyer, but not cop.

It was Friday and I was headed home for a visit. My father met me at the house and we went to the mosque together. As I prayed, I noticed a Turkish man in a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) shirt nearby. I watched as he prayed with his gun strapped to his hip. I didn’t know the man, nor did I talk to him afterward. But seeing him planted a seed. In his own way, he gave me permission to consider law enforcement.

The next semester, I switched my major to law and justice. It was a hybrid prelaw and criminal justice major. I told my parents I wanted to be a lawyer, but my sights were set on federal law enforcement. My grades went from solid Bs to straight As. Right before graduation, I broke the news to my parents that I wanted to be a cop. Not a street cop, but a federal agent. The FBI was recruiting me, but I didn’t have a formal offer.

I papered the region’s police departments with my resume. I was in the running for jobs in Maryland and with the Secret Service, but a New Jersey police department hired me. They promised me an investigative position and a spot on the fugitive task force. I couldn’t say no. The day I graduated from the police academy, the FBI recruiter pulled me aside.

Agent Butler was a former SWAT Team member who was finishing up his career recruiting. I had met him during career day in college. Butler had checked in on me at the police academy, but this meeting was different.

“Let me ask you something,” I said. “You and I have been talking for a couple of years now. You don’t really know me. Why are you pushing the FBI so much on me?”

“I don’t really know you,” he said. “But you speak a language we need. You’re in law enforcement, and before your face is known and before you forget about us, we’d love to have you start the process.”

The Bureau was looking for Middle Easterners to help with terrorism investigations. It was the late 1990s, and terrorism was on their radar after the 1993 World Trade Center bombings. The FBI saw a gap in its ability to track and understand the Islamic terrorism threat.

“What are the chances of me ending up in a van in Detroit or in New York listening to a bunch of dirty Arabs?” I was trying to get a sense of how typecast I’d be.

“Very astute,” he said. “I’m not going to lie to you. A high likelihood. You’re twenty-two years old. We don’t hire twenty-two-year-olds to become agents unless they have one of a handful of things that we need. You speak Arabic. You’re hired for that reason. They’re not going to stick you in a bank robbery squad.”

The FBI was one of my career goals, but more than anything I wanted to get my hands dirty.

“Okay,” I said. “Can you give me some time to figure out what it means to be a cop? Get that out of my system, and maybe our paths will cross later?”

I GRADUATED FROM the police academy on a Friday in 1996. On Monday, I joined a fugitive task force in New Jersey. A couple of years later, I moved over to narcotics and guns. Back in the conference room on 9/11, I couldn’t shake a feeling of guilt. Had I missed my calling? If I’d gone a different route, could I have prevented this? Should I have taken the FBI’s offer?

“There’s nothing we can do about this,” one of my coworkers said. “I’m going back out on the street.”

I couldn’t move. At one point, a sandwich showed up for me. It sat untouched. People shuffled in and out of the room. But I stayed in my seat. An evidence bag of crack cocaine sat in front of me. All day I could feel the rage building in the conference room. There was a twinge of anger in Peter Jennings’s tone as he read the updates. I understood it. But this wasn’t Islam to me.

The sun had set when I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Billy, my sergeant. He didn’t put his hands on anyone unless they were getting arrested.

“We know that is not your religion,” he said. “I hope they get those fucking animals. Go home. Get some sleep.”

It was dark when I finally stood up. I’d been physically, mentally frozen all day. I locked up the office and walked to my car. I didn’t turn on the radio. I just drove to my house in silence. I couldn’t take any more talk about al Qaeda or the attack. I was angry, embarrassed, and hurt. Some asshole in a cave turned me and my family into the enemy. I hadn’t felt this lost since my mother passed.

As I drove home, my mind drifted to 1997. It was July 4th weekend and I’d been a cop for a little more than a year. I was standing in my kitchen when my father called. I could tell something was wrong immediately. There was a hitch in his speech.

“I don’t want to worry you, but your mom started dropping things in the kitchen,” he said. “Being clumsy. She hit a shopping cart at the A&P parking lot. She clipped the mirror pulling out of the garage. I took her to the doctor. They found a brain tumor.”

When my father said “brain tumor,” I felt sick to my stomach. My legs felt weak and I sat down. My father sounded confident as he talked about how one of the best brain surgeons on the East Coast was going to treat her. I knew he was being positive for me and I took the lifeline. She was going to be fine, I told myself.

My mother was in and out of the hospital the next few weeks. The biopsy confirmed the tumor was malignant and aggressive. The treatment plan was to use chemotherapy to shrink it, and then the surgeon would go in and remove it. My father called me after one of her stays in the hospital. My mother wanted to have a party.

Our house had a cabana with a fireplace and furniture. I helped set it up for the party. Growing up, my friends spent from morning to when the streetlights went on swimming and hanging out at the cabana. My mother waited on us with drinks and snacks, but she was more than that to many of my friends. They spent hours talking to her. She knew more about their aspirations and problems than I did. I spoke to my mom every single day I was away at college. So did my roommates. They would run to answer my phone just to talk with her.

On the day of the party, guests arrived in small groups. There were lots of smiles. Some tears. Many laughs. I stayed busy helping with drinks and food. It was around dusk when my father asked me to help my mother to the pool deck. The guests were outside and my father wanted my mother to be in the mix. I trotted across the thick green grass of the backyard and in through the back door of the house.

She smiled and reached for my hand. She clung to me as we walked from the family room to the back door. Each step was a grind.

I used to yell from the pool for more chips or soda. She had walked these few steps with ease and a smile. Now nothing flowed. Her joints were like hinges in need of oil. She was leaning on me so much that I practically carried her across the lawn.

I had leaned on her my whole life. Now she was leaning on me just to get across the yard. My mom wasn’t getting better. She wanted this party to say her goodbyes.

My mother returned to the hospital less than a week later. I lived about an hour south, but I came up a couple of times a week to visit. One evening my father called me and asked if I could keep my mother company.

“Just help her out with dinner,” he said. “Sit with her until I get there.”

I left work early the next day and headed to the hospital. Traffic was terrible and I arrived about ten or fifteen minutes late. She was alone in her room. Her dinner was on the tray across her bed. She had her knife and fork, but her brain wouldn’t let them work together. The fork fell out of her hand. She held the plate with her elbow and tried to cut a piece of meat.

Tears rolled down my face. I froze at the door. I didn’t want her to see me because I knew she’d console me. I wasn’t there for me. I was there to help her. I wiped the tears from my cheeks and walked into the room. My smile hid the pain. I hugged and kissed her.

I made no mention of the fork or knife. I just started cutting her meat and talking. I tried to keep a happy face, but my mother saw right through it. She knew I was hurting.

After her tray was cleared, I sat by her bed. I held her hand. I still wasn’t ready to accept what was happening. But she was. She squeezed my hand and told me it was Allah’s will.

“It is everything I ever taught you,” she said. “You need to believe it in your heart.”

“One day we will all be reunited,” she said, the hint of a smile on her face. “Never spend a day being sad. Remember all the love and the memories we had. Wear them. Use them. Be the good man I know you will be. Help people. Do as much good in this world as you can. I will see you in heaven.”

It was calming, yet devastating. Our bond was for eternity. I needed to hear it. But I still wasn’t ready for the end.

I rocketed up the Garden State Parkway. It was just a setback. It happens. I kept repeating that to myself while I drove. When I got to the hospital, the nurses were standing around crying at their stations. In the short time my mom was there, she knew every nurse by name and everything about them. They adored her.

My father was in the doorway of her room. His arms were crossed. He was crying. It was the first time I’d ever seen him shed a tear. I touched his shoulder and entered the room. In the corner was my sister in a ball. She was hugging her knees and sobbing.

The doctor was at the foot of my mother’s bed looking at her chart. I was struck by how thick it was. He flipped page by page like he was looking for a cure. His eyes never left the chart. I ran to my mother’s side. She was wearing her favorite purple robe. She had a breathing tube in her mouth. Her head was leaning toward me. I grabbed her hand and touched her head. My mouth was dry. My head was throbbing. I wasn’t sure what to do. There was only silence and the hum of her respirator.

Why weren’t we game-planning? Why wasn’t this like a war room? I didn’t want peaceful. I craved action. A plan. Anything but surrender. I stared at the doctor. He kept his gaze on the charts.

“The tumor clearly didn’t reduce in size,” I said, struggling to engage him. “It’s obviously getting bigger. What if we go in and we just try to take it out? You said it would be like arthroscopic surgery. We can just reduce it, right?”

I wanted him to order the nurses to prep my mother for surgery. I wanted him to tell me he was going to save her. The doctor put down the chart and looked at me.

Then I dove across my mother’s legs and reached for his shirt. My pistol—slid into the waistband of my pants—was visible. The doctor recoiled and stayed just out of my grasp.

Then I felt someone grab me. It was my father. He was in shock. He went from watching his wife die to stopping his son from hurting the doctor. I was screaming and yelling as the doctor ran for the door.

Jasmine, one of my mother’s nurses, took me to a neighboring room. She was a Middle Eastern woman in her late forties. Not much younger than my mother.

“I was with your mother before she slipped into the coma,” she said. “Your mother kept looking at something in the room.”

“She saw light,” Jasmine said. “She told me everything was going to be fine. She said, ‘I know it is going to be fine. I am so relieved. Tell my family it is all going to be okay.’”

A police officer arrived a few minutes later. He was wearing sergeant stripes and a stern look. Jasmine met him at the door. She said a couple of words to him just out of earshot before he walked over to me.

My mother died later that day. I didn’t sleep for weeks. I paced. I stared out the window. When I got home on September 11, 2001, I felt the same profound sense of loss. But unlike with my mother, there was something I could do to help. The next day, I met Billy in his office.

“The FBI,” I said. “I speak Arabic. I know the religion. I know the culture.”

I needed Billy’s permission to talk with the FBI. Billy signed off immediately. The next day Jim, the FBI resident agent, met me.

It was three days after the attack. The Bureau was running down every lead they had on the hijackers. There were reports of meetings in a northern Virginia mosque, of trips to flight schools in Florida, and of post office boxes and checks cashed in Virginia Beach. Every FBI agent seemed to be working the case.

He looked haggard. His suit jacket was absent. His shirt was wrinkled and he moved with a nervous energy. He hadn’t slept for days and likely wouldn’t for the next few at least.

“I speak Arabic,” I told him. “I’m Sunni Muslim. If there is anything I can do, let me know. I cleared it through my chain of command. I want to help.”

“We really appreciate it,” Jim said. “We’ll definitely be reaching out to you if we need you.”

I got the message. Don’t call us. We’ll call you. The meeting had lasted less than thirty minutes. I followed up with Jim for weeks after the attacks, but he was always too busy to talk. The FBI was waking up to a new war. They could no longer just be cops. They had to adapt to meet a new enemy.

When I arrived in America, Islam just was. Now it was the only thing that mattered.

CHAPTER 3

No Fear

THE FIRST RULE of undercover work is: The day you’re not scared anymore is the day you have to get out.

It was the summer of 2008 and I’d been working drugs for ten years. Rico Jordan’s cover story led me from the fringe into the heart of the drug scene in New Jersey. I’d picked up some informants who knew I was a cop. One of my best was Jose, a fat Hispanic guy from the neighborhood. His information got more drugs off the street than most detectives. He also elevated Rico Jordan’s profile. In the drug world, you’re only as good as who you know. Jose was connected to all the players, so by extension, so was Rico Jordan.

My new target was a Dominican crew led by two guys named Manuel and King, who used their limousine service to bring drugs down from Spanish Harlem. Billy only agreed to take on the case after the DEA asked us for help. They wanted Manuel’s crew, but they didn’t have an undercover who could do it. My source, Jose, already had an in, so the DEA agreed to front the cash.

We met at the office before the first buy. I sat around the table with Billy; Mike, the case agent who would run our side of the investigation; Steve, who used to work with us before transferring to the DEA; and two other DEA supervisors.

I was bored from the jump. I knew how to handle myself. I lived it every day. I didn’t need a bunch of DEA guys in suits who hadn’t made a drug buy in decades—if ever—telling me anything. I zoned out for most of the meeting. Then one of the DEA agents mentioned something about Bangkok.

“We’ve gotten information about a large shipment of heroin coming in from Bangkok,” one of the DEA supervisors said.

I smiled like a junior high school kid. I caught Mike’s eye. He and I had worked together for years. He was a big Italian guy with piercing blue eyes. I was his undercover. We had made a lot of great cases together. We also had the same sense of humor.

I snorted, trying to hold in a laugh, and covered my mouth with my hand. The DEA supervisor giving the briefing hesitated for a second. I could feel Billy’s eyes on me. I glanced up. He had the look of an embarrassed parent.

Billy and the DEA agents just stared at me and Mike. Steve knew us too well and laughed.

I stepped out of the room. Looking back, I’m embarrassed. The DEA was about to trust me with tens of thousands of dollars and I’m laughing at “Bangkok.” I was too cavalier going into the operation.

Living up to his reputation, Jose set up an introductory meeting with Manuel at a downtown row house in New Jersey. They were sniffing me out. If this meeting went well, I’d meet the supplier.

The humidity hit me the second I climbed out of my car, but everything else seemed right. My spotters were in place. Jose was waiting in front of the house. He was holding a can of Coke. I never saw him without a can, and never the diet stuff.

Jose knocked and a tall Dominican opened the door. He had a scraggly beard and was wearing a tank top with a pile of chest hair climbing out the front.

We followed him through the house to the basement door. I cased the place as we walked. There were toys on the floor and the table was clogged with mail. The row house looked lived in and not by a bunch of gangsters. A family lived here.

Jose went down the wooden stairs first. I followed. The Dominican bolted the door. Manuel was standing in the middle of the room with another bodyguard. He had a massive gut. It stuck out like a pregnant woman’s stomach. A skinny beard framed his face. He was still dressed from his shift driving one of the limos; his dress shirt was unbuttoned at the neck and his black slacks were wrinkled.

The basement was unfinished. Everything had a musty smell, but it was cooler than being on the street. A small table sat in the middle of the room. Chairs were arranged around it. I spotted some trash bags in one corner. The only way in or out was through the bolted door at the top of the stairs, but I wasn’t worried. I wasn’t going to die in this basement. Something about doing a drug deal with a guy in business casual set my mind at ease.

We gathered around the table. Manuel and Jose made the introductions. I wanted to buy a few ounces of cocaine to start. My goal was to make Manuel believe this was an ongoing thing. Five kilos a month forever and ever, amen.

I was flippant. Dismissive. Cocky. It didn’t matter that I was in a basement with only one way out.

Manuel insisted. The extra money was for delivery. He was offering to bring five kilos of coke to my door once a month.

“You’re out of your fucking mind,” I said. “Why am I going to pay so much? I can drive up to New York myself and buy it anywhere in Spanish Harlem.”

The second rule in undercover work is to always deescalate. Don’t take control of the situation like a cop. You don’t control the room. But I wasn’t following the rules. A smirk creased my lips as Manuel explained the economics of drug dealing.

“I get what a delivery charge is,” I said, leaning back in my chair. “But you’re fucking bending me over.”

“Come on, Rico,” he said when I ignored him. “Let’s just get a taste to start and work out the price next time.”

He calmed everything down with one sentence. Manuel looked at him and then at me.

“Let’s get the taste and then we’ll see what’s what,” I said. “We can finalize the price when I meet your guy.”

I made the first buy without incident. Now we were in business. Manuel agreed to deliver one kilogram of cocaine and a thousand pills of Ecstasy. He also agreed to bring the supplier.

“We’re not meeting there again,” he told me during the debrief. “Find a new place.”

We set the next buy in a row house we could control. It was wired with video cameras and microphones. Billy staged the arrest team around the corner. Jose and I waited for Manuel and his boss, King, to show up. They were driving down from New York. We had them under surveillance the whole ride.

Mike picked them up when they got near the house. He was driving a gold Ford Taurus and drove right up behind the limousine as soon as they got close.

Mike was notorious for bumper-locking suspects. Instead of shadowing them on parallel streets, he jumped into their backseat and hounded them like a guy late for a meeting. I warned him about it before the buy, but he ignored me. Mike followed Manuel for a few blocks and then peeled off just before they arrived.

Jose and I saw the limousine pull up. It sat idling for a few minutes. No one moved. I could hear Manuel put the car in gear. He eased it off the curb and drove off.

I lit a cigarette just as Manuel rolled to a stop at the curb again. He walked to the trunk and took out a gym bag. King climbed out of the back and joined Manuel in front of the house.

King was about forty years old with a lean build, short cropped black hair, dark brown eyes, and a scar on his forehead. He was dressed like a drug dealer trying to look like a businessman. Nice pants, but baggy. A designer button-down dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves and opened in front so you could see his Guinea tee and gold chains. He wore a gold pinky ring. His pinky had a very long fingernail—a coke nail—used to scoop and sniff cocaine.

Manuel and King were speaking in rapid-fire Spanish as they walked up to the house. It took Jose a second to figure out what was being said.

“There was a white guy in a gold car,” Manuel said to me in English. “He was following us.”

“You’re talking about crazy Eric,” I said, waving my hand like I was shooing him away. “That fucking guy follows people around all the time out here.”

To this day, I still have no idea how I pulled that out of my ass. Even now, guys in the department still talk about Crazy Eric. Manuel wasn’t sure if I was kidding or not. But it wasn’t what I was saying. It was how I said it. I was calm and they believed I was taking the same risk as they were.

“He’s a crazy white guy that follows everybody,” I said, shrugging and turning to enter the house. “Don’t worry about him. He’s a nobody.”

CONTENTS

GLOSSARY OF ARABIC WORDS

NOTE TO THE READER

CHAPTER 1

Super High

CHAPTER 2

I Am a Muslim

CHAPTER 3

No Fear