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When Orlando Requejo-Pupo fled Cuba in a tiny, leaky boat with a group of refugees, he hoped to start a new life in Dallas. After a hellish 58-day journey—adrift in the Gulf of Mexico, without food or water, battered by two hurricanes—he made it to the city of his dreams. But then the refugees started talking about the one person onboard who didn’t make it.
July/2005
by Todd Bensman
THE CALL FOR HELP came in at about 10 o’clock on a hot, moonless summer night. The firefighters of Corpus Christi’s Station 16 lounged around a television, and Ruben Ortiz half-heartedly thumbed through a book. Their jurisdiction was Mustang Island, a narrow 5-mile strip of sand and waterfront properties just off Corpus Christi Bay. Life on the barrier island was usually low-key on weeknights in late summer, and most of the calls to the station were forgettable and routine. But when the men heard the news on the night of August 24, 2004, every languorous soul in Station 16 flew into action.
The dispatcher had reported that a small boat had washed ashore, and people had staggered toward the lights of the mostly vacant Mayan Princess condominiums. Shadowy figures were knocking on doors, scaring residents. The firefighters were soon grinding slowly south along the water’s edge. Their searchlight beams sliced through the darkness, finally coming to rest on a fishing boat that was no more than 18 feet long.
Beached, it lay tilted on its side, revealing a barnacle-encrusted bottom. Ortiz and the other firefighters jumped down to see if anyone was onboard. Their flashlights revealed a squalid tangle of detritus inside: cans, bottles, scraps of clothing, a crude sail, and some large barrels. But no people.The men turned toward the condos up the beach, and that’s where they found the survivors. An elderly woman wearing filthy rags lay unmoving on a boardwalk, too delirious to speak.
Sitting next to her was a skeletally thin bearded man who was almost black from exposure. All he could muster was a faint, raspy, “Agua. Agua, por favor.” As the firefighters filled small white paper cones with water from the truck’s cooler, a police car pulled up. Inside were four sunken-faced men who had wandered up the beach, knocking on doors and begging for water.
Ortiz, the only firefighter who spoke Spanish, leaned in to the squad car as the men gulped down water.
“Where is this? Where are we?” one of them asked Ortiz, who noticed an unusual accent.
“You are in Corpus Christi.”
The four men glanced at one another quizzically. “What is Corpus Christi?” one asked.
“Texas,” Ortiz responded. “You are in Texas, in the United States of America.”
Puzzled expressions turned to glee. One man dropped his face into cupped hands.
“This,” one of them declared, “is a gift from God.”
THE FIREFIGHTERS WERE STUNNED to learn that the five men and one woman were Cuban refugees. Although it is common for Cubans to flee Fidel Castro’s broken economy by sailing to South Florida, which is only 90 miles away, no refugee boat from Cuba had ever been known to land on the Texas coast, which is more than 1,000 miles away.
How, the disbelieving firefighters wondered, could these six people have completed such a voyage on that good-for-nothing boat, especially after a powerful hurricane and two tropical storms had just pummeled the Gulf of Mexico?
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Tom Coleman is Not the Biggest Racist in America
November/2005
When 10 percent of the black residents of a small Panhandle town were snagged in a drug bust, the white cop responsible for it became the poster boy for bigotry. It's time to unlearn everything you think you know about Tulia, Texas.
by Todd Bensman
THE LAWYERS HAD POCKETED THEIR MILLIONS. The politicians had secured their votes. The book and movie deals had been signed. By January 2005, more than four years after the Panhandle town of Tulia had made national headlines for a huge drug bust that snared an almost unbelievable 10 percent of the town’s black residents, only one matter remained: to punish the racist cop responsible for the sting.
His name was Tom Coleman, a white freelance undercover agent who had busted 46 people, 40 of whom were black. The arrests were based solely on Coleman’s word. He’d worked alone and had not used video or audio surveillance to support his charges. It didn’t take long for the media to uncover the story.
Bob Herbert, a columnist for the New York Times, wrote that Coleman was a racist cop who had targeted innocent blacks. The ACLU proposed in a successful civil lawsuit that Coleman conspired “to accomplish the forbidden aim of cleansing Tulia of its black population.” Coleman’s ex-wife even revealed that he was “a card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan.”
More salacious accusations followed from the men and women Coleman had arrested: that he had used drugs during the sting, that he had manufactured evidence, that he had had sex with some of the female defendants. Coleman didn’t help his case by appearing disorganized and confused, and when he admitted that he had used the word “nigger,” he only fueled the media’s outrage. Coleman became the Mark Fuhrman of Texas, and the most hated lawman in the state had to be brought to justice.
By the time Coleman found himself in front of a Lubbock jury earlier this year, Gov. Rick Perry had pardoned 35 of the convicted drug dealers, and the case had produced $6.3 million in legal settlements. Coleman faced up to three decades in prison on a trio of state perjury charges, but they were only distantly related to his work on the busts. It did seem odd that after all the hype, prosecutors could muster a case based only on Coleman’s testimony during the Tulia trials about his conduct at a job he’d held years ago. But the victims were eager to find justice anywhere they could. The packed courtroom pulsed with contempt. Vengeance seemed at hand.
When the verdict finally came on a Friday, it wasn’t very satisfying. Two of the three charges didn’t stick, and Coleman returned home to Waxahachie with a single penny-ante perjury conviction, 10 years’ probation, and a bout of the flu. And by Monday—Martin Luther King Jr. Day—the flu was already clearing up.
How could Coleman get off so easily? And why wasn’t anyone going to pay for the grave injustice committed in Tulia? As it turns out, the media got the story wrong—or never wanted to know the truth.
To be sure, Coleman’s sloppy police work critically weakened some of his cases and, by extension, all of them. But he was never a criminal conspirator determined to carry out ethnic cleansing in a small Texas town. At worst he’s an absent-minded lunkhead who was unqualified to do the job. Had reporters done their homework, they would have learned that Coleman wasn’t the villain his critics wanted him to be. Take the KKK business. Yes, it is true that at one time he had befriended some Klan members in Ellis County. But a little detail had been overlooked: he had infiltrated their group as a supervised undercover agent, and he busted three of his “brothers” for dealing methamphetamine.
And that’s just the beginning. The government itself conducted two civil rights investigations—one by the FBI and the other by the Texas attorney general’s office. Both agencies to this day have refused to share their reports with the public.
But they have slipped out. And, according to those documents, the evidence reveals a far different Tom Coleman than the one his enemies set out to destroy—and the world seemed determined not to know.
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THE QUIET AMERICAN
March/2007
By Todd Bensman
Gamal Abdel-Hafiz was once one of the most valuable counter-terrorism assets the FBI had.
He turned up the names of half the Al Qaida conspirators who planned the USS Cole bombing in 2001. He was the agent who, with a single skillfully executed interrogation in Bahrain, broke open the Lackawanna Six case in 2002, which President Bush touted as the biggest success to that point in the War on Terror. He’d worked closely with the New York-based I-49 squad to help bust one of the Africa embassy bombers. He also happened to be the first ever Muslim Arab immigrant FBI agent, on a first-name basis with an ever appreciative Director Louis Freeh.
But by 2003, he’d been fired and disgraced, all but branded a traitor repeatedly in the national media. Two Chicago FBI agents had gone public questioning the loyalty of their Egypt-born and educated Muslim colleague, on program such as ABC’s Primetime and The O’Reilly Factor, and in the pages of Newsweek, Time and The Wall Street Journal. Everywhere.
The alarming story they framed surely merited press scrutiny coming as it had from two active field agents: A Muslim FBI agent – Abdel-Hafiz - had on two occasions refused direct orders, on religious grounds, to wear a hidden body recorder to interview targets of terrorism investigations during the late 1990s. One of these investigations involved possible money laundering to Osama bin Ladin’s Al Qaeda. “A Muslim does not record another Muslim,” he’d supposedly been caught saying in a moment of indiscretion.
Then, the story line went, rather than investigate Abdel-Hafiz as a double agent, politically correct FBI bureaucrats promoted him to a sensitive frontline post in Saudi Arabia, where he was presumed to be doing national security damage in the critical time after 9-11. That unchallenged theme buzzed through the Internet and mainstream media well into 2003. Abdel-Hafiz was a traitor. Abdel-Hafiz was a mole. Abdel-Hafiz should be strung up.
Throughout the humiliating public drubbings, Abdel-Hafiz had followed orders to keep his mouth shut, which only conspired to support the appearance of guilt. But in October of that year, he let a reporter into his suburban Dallas home to finally speak at length about the media charges of treasonous acts.
“Unfortunately, because I respected my agency, and I respected my obligation to my agency to not respond, it was taken for granted that I was guilty of these accusations,” he said. “A lot of people in the media and on the Internet took it and flew with it, and they spoke out of ignorance.”
He turned his eyes to the wall of a home office. “The proudest day of my life,” he said with a noticeably foreign accent, looking at the photo of himself shaking the hand of then Director Freeh. It was 1996. Graduation day at Quantico. “It really was a very emotional moment for me, knowing I was the very first Muslim FBI agent in the history of the FBI. It was really something that I will never forget.”
Occasionally, social inhibitions collapsed in a flaring anger that help explain his actions in the years since.
“I did not only lose my job. I lost my dignity, my reputation,” he barked at one point, slapping a palm hard on a desk. “I lost self respect, for myself and my family, because of the accusations.”
It was all “a fabricated lie!”
There was scant press notice when Abdel-Hafiz was reinstated to the FBI a few months later. Today, the reputed traitor is back in counter-terrorism, quietly working out of the Dallas field office. He can’t talk publicly anymore, as an agent. But he’s been waging a war in addition to the one on global terrorism ever since – in the Texas court system.
He aims to reclaim a reputation he says has remains sullied in the collective public mind, with defamation lawsuits against his former colleagues and some big-name TV personalities: O’Reilly and ABC correspondent Brian Ross among others.
The FBI agent has been kicking up a lot of dust, dragging people like O’Reilly, Ross and their producers into deposition rooms outside of public view, tearing apart their reporting, challenging their reputations.
From the depositions and subpoenaed reporters’ notes, as well as interviews with a broad spectrum of current and former FBI officials, a maddeningly story emerges. It is that, as Abdel-Hafiz said, the press reports about him were mostly dead wrong. About his supposed refusal to secretly record Muslim targets. About all of it.
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HA
HAMAS’S ROCK STAR
By day he was an engineer working for the city of Dallas. On weekends he entertained at fundraisers for a terrorist group.
BY TODD BENSMAN
JUST DAYS after his party's upset landslide in the Palestinian elections, Hamas's supreme political leader, Khaled Meshal, was thrust into an unfamiliar spotlight, on the front page of the New York Times and in the looping reels of cable news shows. The whole world seems these days to hang on every defiant word Khaled utters from his hideout in Damascus, where he's been ducking Israeli assassins the last several years.
Khaled's newfound top billing is all the more striking since his name recognition had long been confined to the smallish geography of the Arab-Israeli conflict and an even smaller circle of Western intelligence experts. Now, the reviled terrorist leader, outlawed by the Americans and hunted by the Israelis, has pulled up a seat at the international table.
If, by the end of last week, Americans were unsure how exactly to react to the Hamas leader, there's been no such ambivalence about Khaled's kid brother, who lives in President George W. Bush's home state of Texas. The feds have corraled Khaled's half-brother Mufid in Dallas, in what is currently the administration's signature domestic terrorism case. He is expected to go on trial later this year.
It was a big surprise in Dallas when Mufid Abdulqader, a publicly mild-mannered civil engineer employed by the city, was named on July 26, 2004, with six other men, in a 42-count indictment of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. The feds say the Holy Land Foundation was a bogus North Texas Muslim "charity" that had actually served since 1989 as Hamas's largest clandestine source of funding in the United States--collecting "over $57 million" in donations between 1992 and 2001. So important did the administration consider the Holy Land Foundation's role in the financial infrastructure of international terror that President Bush himself announced its closing in a December 2001 Rose Garden event.
But there were bigger surprises about Mufid, beyond the striking fact that his older brother served as the supreme political leader of Hamas. Since coming to America in 1980 and gaining citizenship, he has lived a double life that at once defines the differences between the brothers and underscores a chilling ideological sameness--mainly their shared fondness for the idea of murdering Jews.
While the government says Khaled is a stone-cold deployer of suicide bombers, Mufid was a singer in a troupe that toured the country. It wasn't exactly feel-good music in the conventional sense. Mufid's Al Sakhra ("The Rock") band crooned a gospel of death and hatred toward the Jews at Hamas fundraisers, while the collection plates moved through wildly enthusiastic Arab-American audiences.
