While you were at Brooklyn College, this is when the person who later
came out as an informant first contacted you, right? Yes. Tell me about
that experience, getting to know him, what he was like.
I was contacted, I think, around March, early March 2012, so it's almost
been six years.
And it was through Facebook, social media once again, our good friend.
And so he messaged me, I don't particularly remember exactly what he said,
but something along the lines of that he's looking to
participate
in our community, he's looking to do good work,
he wanted to get involved with folks, and he was based out in
Jackson Heights and Queens, so it was kind of far from Brighton Beach.
But I said, "Yeah, sure, you're more than welcome to come to our
local mosque." So he stayed with us for quite some time,
he would come to all of our events.
At the time,
the conflict in Syria started to take on more violent proportions.
And we were raising money for refugees at the time, so we were
selling wristbands. And I
think I gave him like 10 to 20 wristbands, and they were five dollars each.
You know those LIVESTRONG wristbands? Yeah. And he came back pretty quickly
with the funds,
telling me that he sold them all, and I'm like, "Alright,
wow, you must know a lot of people if you're able to sell
10 to 20 wristbands for five bucks each to
what I imagine were mostly undergrads." He wasn't a college student at the
time. Anyway, he was with us for most of our events. He would
come to every lecture that we attended, every workshop, every training.
Usually would show up late, and later we found out why.
But eventually in October, sometime early October, he confessed
publicly on Facebook to being an informant for the NYPD.
That's when things sort of blew up,
yeah. Why was he late? He would come late to events,
so that he could get a glimpse of the attendance sheet,
and take photos of everybody, the names and emails and numbers of everyone
who came to the event, so he could send it off to his
handler. Holy cow. Yeah, so he came deliberately late, just so he could...
And we just thought it was a commuting issue, but
there was a method to the craziness, yeah.
What did you think about him as a person? I thought he was
a troubled person seeking a better life.
From what I knew of his past, he got kicked out of school,
he got into some fights. His family was originally from Bangladesh so he
grew up in a Muslim family.
He had a history of drug use, drug abuse.
I assumed he may have had a mental illness, which was later confirmed
for me. I just really thought he was sort of socially off,
trying to figure himself out,
a little confused, existentially confused. And so I
let that go, and some of my friends would come up to me
and say, "What's up with this guy? Why is he so weird?
Why is he so awkward?" Close to the end, when I say close
to the end, I mean close to before he confessed, folks came up to
me saying that they believed he was a spy or an informant,
and I shrugged it off, I was like, "No, that can't be.
He's just a confused kid." Of course, they were later vindicated after he
confessed, and I felt like the dumb guy for being like, assuming the
best and what not. I was the nice guy and I still am,
making excuses for people all the time. But that's what I thought of
him. When he would meet folks immediately, when I would introduce him to
new friends, he'd be like, "Can I get your number?" Right away,
boy or girl, it wouldn't matter, he'd be like, "Can I get your
number?" And essentially, really why he wanted the number was so that he
could send it off back to his handler, his police handler. And folks
found that awkward, you don't usually ask people for their numbers the moment
you meet them.
But again, I just attributed it to like a social deficiency.
And so that's what I thought for most of the time while he
was with us. Wow. Yeah. Tell me about reading his Facebook post,
what did it say and... I still have it saved
for the memory.
He wrote something about
the NYPD using him as part of the, what he called a Ponzi scheme.
And he recalled that when he was working as an informant and going
to different lectures and events, he saw other people who were informants
there. In other words, there were more than one of him and he
saw
those people. And he assumed that they were sent to spy on him
and he was sent to spy on them.
And he thought that the NYPD was duping him.
And he finally got sick of it, and so he confessed. But at
the same time, he wasn't really a friend of us either,
he wasn't doing it out of benevolence toward the community that he was
spying on either. He wrote about us as if we were gullible people
for believing in religion, so he was very anti religion and what not.
And so he was against us and the police, in a way. And
for him, I think this was just a way of expressing that.
Of course, again, mental health issues, a lot of problems. These are usually
the people and the profile that's often targeted by the police,
that's the type of person that they would want to hire as an
informant. So we later learned that he was caught on drug possession charges
or something like that, and they told him either, "You face a certain number
of years in jail or you spy for us." Originally, they wanted him to
spy on a narcotics group, but he said he
didn't wanna spy on his own people, so he spied on Muslims instead,
which was funny 'cause he grew up Muslim.
And so that was what he wrote in his confession. Wow. Yeah.
So,
I believe the AP story about it, when a piece of surveillance came out in
2011... Yes, correct. So, just a little bit before. Yes, so the AP
story that came out in 2011, that was more of a general report
about the fact that there is surveillance activity and
some 15,000 plained clothes officers in the tri-state area, including outside
of what's their jurisdiction, meaning in New Jersey.
And so this was about a year later.
When people were suspicious of this, it was because
people in the community already knew that this was happening. Exactly.
Exactly, yeah. Were there any suspicions of surveillance before that story
broke or was it all after?
Yes, there were.
Again, as I mentioned, friends approached me believing that he was an informant
before he confessed himself to be... Oh, I mean before the AP story came
out. Oh, before the AP story came out?
I always like to think that there is an implicit... Back then at
least, we would always used to have this
implicitly understood that
we are being spied on. There was this assumed thing.
We wouldn't always verbalize it, but it was assumed. And you would be
able to tell by the way people were talking,
especially when political issues came up, particularly about the Middle
East and South Asia.
And
there were times when people would be very tense, or people would say,
"Let's not talk about this, maybe this is not the time or place."
So there were definitely... It was an assumed thing that we are being
spied on. This is a post 9/11 world now with the Patriot Act. All
these sorts infringements on our rights are taking place.
Just because we don't have confirmation, doesn't mean it's not happening.
And so it was assumed, yeah. What did that
caution
you to in the community? What kind of changes did you see?
A lot of community members, for example, I remember
in Hunter College, I wasn't a student there, but I remember in front
of the MSA, the prayer room door,
there was a sign that said, "Please no political discussions in the prayer
room." And if you know Muslims and Arabs, that's like 75%
of our conversation. So it's like, "What are we gonna talk about?
The rest is about marriage." And so
it was very chilling, because we didn't know who to trust and who
to speak to, whether the guy praying next to me is an informant or a
friend.
And that really deteriorates the social cohesion of a community.