In an episode of CSI, the cops would have wrapped that one up in a tight little package and gone to a grand jury. But, this, please understand, was the New York Office of the FBI – which spent 12 years from the 1989 Calverton surveillance to 9/11 seemingly disconnecting the dots on al Qaeda's New York cell.
The Way They Got Gotti?
Flash forward to early September of 1992, just weeks after Yousef's arrival in New York. Napoli and Anticev summoned Abouhalima and a number of other "ME's" down to 26 Federal Plaza in a ham-handed attempt to shake them.
They had the Egyptians fingerprinted. Next they showed them pictures of the Calverton surveillance and demanded details of the Kahane homicide, asking them if they knew Nosair or the blind Sheikh. Anticev warned them that eventually the Feds would get Sheikh Rahman the same way they’d gotten John Gotti.
But Abouhalima, a hardened Ali Mohamed-trained operative, just thumbed his nose at the Feds and went back to New Jersey to help Ramzi Yousef morph the "12 Jewish locations" plot into the World Trade Center bombing conspiracy.
Later, in a bomb factory on Pamrapo Avenue in Jersey City, with Salameh's help, they constructed the 1,500 pound device that they later planted on the B-2 level beneath the WTC's North Tower.
"Don't call me when the bombs go off"
By this time, Emad Salem, Nancy Floyd's asset, was out of the cell. But the FBI continued to pay him through the summer, weaning him until he got a new job.
In October, 1992 he met Floyd at a Subway sandwich shop near 26 Federal Plaza to get his last cash payment of $500. During the brief encounter, Salem tried to warn her. He'd caught wind that something was being planned, and he begged her to follow Nosair's two getaway drivers, Abouhalima and Salameh.
But Floyd's hands were tied. She told Salem that in the weeks since he'd left, she'd been frozen out of the terrorism investigation by ASAC Dunbar. She would try and pass on the word and encourage the surveillance, but there was little else she could do.
Still, insistent that something terrible was about to happen, Salem issued a chilling warning. If the FBI wouldn't follow "The Red and Salameh," as he'd warned, them, then they shouldn't "bother to call" him "when the bombs go off."
Floyd passed on Salem's warning, but the FBI made no effort to track Salameh and "The Red." If they had, they would have led federal agents straight to Yousef and the bomb.
Later, when I asked Det. Lou Napoli why they'd dropped the ball and failed to follow the highly visible red-headed Abouhalima, he said, "Abouhalima beat feet on us... We were trying to locate him but he went to Jersey. You've got to remember, there are boundaries. The Hudson River separates New York and New Jersey."
But as anybody who watched The Sopranos knows, that's absurd: The Feds have multi-state jurisdiction to track terrorists.
Yousef's first WTC attack
Around noon on Feb. 26, 1993, after the FBI's New York Office had ignored Salem's warning, Ramzi Yousef's gigantic urea-nitrate device went off, blowing through four floors of eleven-inch thick rebarred concrete beneath the Twin Towers. Six people died, including a pregnant woman. A thousand were injured.
