http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116736247579862262.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
An L.A. Police Bust
Shows New Tactics
For Fighting Terror
Officers Use Local Laws
To Arrest Small Offenders
With High-Risk Potential
Foiling a Chechen 'Charity'
By ROBERT BLOCK
December 29, 2006; Page A1
LOS ANGELES -- In September 2004, just days after Chechen rebels raided a
school in Beslan, Russia, killing 331 men, women and children, the Los
Angeles Police Department summoned senior officers to its decaying downtown
headquarters. The issue on the table: What would they do if a similar attack
took place here?
Most of the talk that morning was about where to deploy SWAT teams if
terrorists ever took over a local school. Detective Mark Severino, one of
the city's counterterrorist investigators, then asked his colleagues: "Do we
even have Chechen extremists in Los Angeles?" Blank stares and silence
filled the room. His boss at the time, Deputy Chief John Miller, told him to
go find out.
[M S]Within weeks, Detective Severino, working with a team of LAPD
intelligence analysts, tapped Russian underworld informants, and uncovered
an international car-theft ring that wound its way from the streets of Los
Angeles to the Chechens' doorstep in the Republic of Georgia. The California
racket was disguised as a charity group sending aid to the region. Based on
other information, Detective Severino suspected that the operation was more
than just a fraud scheme. His theory: The proceeds from stolen cars might
somehow be financing Chechen terrorist operations around the world.
On Feb. 15, 2006, the LAPD busted eight people for fraud in connection with
the alleged scam and issued arrest warrants for 11 others. Chechen terrorist
financing was never mentioned in the indictments or in the press release
that trumpeted the takedown of the operation. There were no news conferences
claiming victory in the war on terror. Yet Russian police, U.S. intelligence
and State Department officials familiar with the case today all say that
they believe the LAPD's breakup of the ring was a setback to international
terrorists.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, America's entire approach to
security has changed. Intelligence agencies were revamped and a new
government bureaucracy, the Department of Homeland Security, was created.
Now local police are getting more involved too. Increasingly, the job of
detecting would-be terrorists and their support networks in the U.S. is
falling to America's 800,000 state and local police. They far outnumber
federal agents, and their eyes and ears are attuned to know more about
what's suspicious in their own communities. Los Angeles has created one of
the most active counterterrorist police departments in the country, often
reacting to overseas attacks with its own contingency planning.
But it's not just big-city forces that are stepping in to counter terrorism.
Police departments in smaller cities like Charlotte, N.C., and Providence,
R.I., are also following suit. Over the past few years, state and local
police have been taking millions of dollars from state and federal funds to
open so-called fusion centers -- high-tech offices where local cops and
officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of
Homeland Security share and analyze information about crimes and terrorist
groups. Currently there are about 40 such centers around the country with
many more under development.
The Los Angeles police's low-key strategy is to use local laws -- from
parking ordinances to antifraud statutes -- to crack down on suspected
terrorists. It's akin to the tactic the federal government used in the 1930s
when going after gangster Al Capone: He was indicted for tax evasion instead
of murder.
Los Angeles police say that since 9/11 they have arrested nearly 200 people,
both American citizens and foreign nationals, with suspected ties to
terrorist organizations. These included a group of North Africans that LAPD
and federal officials are convinced were part of an al Qaeda support cell
living in Los Angeles. The charges against them have ranged from marriage
fraud to identity theft to illegal weapons possession.
[Map]Each arrest was the result of a conventional criminal investigation
using California state law with no need for warrantless phone taps or secret
court orders. None of the cases ever mentioned terrorism at all. Trials are
still pending in many cases but there have been dozens of guilty pleas. In
some cases, suspected foreign terrorists arrested on fraud charges have been
scooped up by federal agents and deported on separate federal immigration
charges before their criminal trials got under way.
At a time when the FBI and other Washington agencies are coming under
growing criticism for terrorism cases that often fall apart in the courts,
the Los Angeles police approach using conventional crime cases is gaining
attention as an alternative.
"What the LAPD is doing with a straightforward crimes approach is upholding
the integrity of the justice system and showing that when used correctly it
is powerful and effective," says Karen Greenberg, executive director of New
York University's Center on Law and Security. The think tank has been
tracking the government's prosecution record of domestic terrorism cases
since 9/11.
Some civil-rights groups and Muslim organizations are concerned about
putting too much counterterrorism responsibility in the hands of local
police.
Hamid Khan, the executive director of the South Asian Network, a local
civil-rights group representing many Islamic community groups, says that
many Muslims are fearful of the LAPD's reputation for excessive force and
view much of its policing efforts in Muslim migrant areas of the city as
insensitive.
Shiu-Ming Cheer, a community activist with the South Asian Network, says
that she was aware of two cases in which Muslim women called the police to
report domestic abuse only to be ridiculed by the responding officers. "The
women said the police told them: 'Isn't wife beating part of your culture?
Why are you bothering us?' "
LAPD officials say they are mindful of the concerns of ethnic groups and
sensitive about collecting intelligence about people who might not be
directly related to a crime under investigation. At the same time, however,
the force is pushing state officials for permission to retain information on
suspected terrorist cases for longer than the 12-month limit currently
imposed by state law. The LAPD's approach to counterterrorism has its roots
in the policing model known as "No Broken Windows." Under this approach,
police actively move against small crimes and in the process find out
information about bigger crimes. Subway turnstile jumpers in New York, for
instance, have often been found to be purse snatchers or drug runners, and
their arrests have in some cases led to information about much more
aggressive street crimes.
The method was pioneered by LAPD's chief of police, William Bratton, when he
served more than a decade ago as the commissioner of the New York Police
Department. It was one of the strategies he brought with him when he took
over as the Los Angeles police chief in October 2002, inheriting a
department beset by soaring crime and steeped in scandal and racial tension.
Chief Bratton reorganized the department and took hundreds of cops out of
administrative jobs and put them on the streets. He then began strictly
enforcing quality-of-life crimes, going after graffiti vandals, purse
snatchers and prostitutes, figuring that stopping small crimes creates a
less criminal-friendly environment. With more than 650 murders in 2002, Los
Angeles had more homicides in that year than any other city in the nation. A
year later, the murder rate was down almost 25% and overall crime was down
by more than 4%.
Now, Chief Bratton is adapting the same model to terrorism, calling it
intelligence-led policing. "Where as once we would have caught a robber
red-handed and that would have been enough to satisfy the legal case, we now
have to stop and ask ourselves, who is this robber?" Chief Bratton explains.
"Is he stealing to feed a drug habit? OK, who is he buying his drugs from?
Or is he robbing to raise funds to buy guns for a gang? Which gang? Who are
his associates? Or is he part of organized crime or something else? The aim
is to drill down into crime to get a complete picture of the crime landscape
in your community."
That's what happened in the Chechen probe. Sitting around the table on the
sixth floor of the Parker Center, the LAPD's 1950s-era headquarters, after
the dust settled on the Beslan massacre, LAPD's Counterterrorism and
Criminal Intelligence Bureau met to discuss what would happen if a similar
attack had taken place in Los Angeles.
At first, they looked at the attack only tactically, talking about how they
would move SWAT teams around the city and put together crowd-control
contingencies. But then Detective Severino began pushing the thinking toward
intelligence. Was Los Angeles ready for Chechen terrorism in general? And
were there Chechen rebel links to the city that they didn't know about?
After being given the nod to investigate by his bosses, Mr. Severino put
together a team of 11 detectives. The first thing they did was visit
informants they had developed in Russian and Armenian organized-crime gangs
from earlier investigations.
The inquiries pointed the investigators to a Chechen businessman affiliated
with an organization billing itself as a charity called Global Human
Services, or GHS. The group claimed to be sending large shipments of
humanitarian aid regularly to Russia, Armenia, Georgia and Jordan.
Several things during the investigation immediately caught Detective
Severino's attention. The first were photos prominently displayed in the
businessman's home of him standing alongside Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev,
known during his lifetime as the "Butcher of Beslan." The second was the
fact that GHS's license had been revoked by the state of California in
February 2004 for failure to file a 2003 income-tax return. Moreover, it
turned out that GHS was incorporated in November 1999 as a regular business
and wasn't registered as a nonprofit charity.
For Mr. Severino, those facts sent alarm bells ringing. The investigators
continued to dig. The LAPD informed the Department of Homeland Security that
the group was sending aid overseas despite having lost its license.
In June 2005, Immigration and Customs Enforcement inspectors in Houston
pulled two GHS shipping containers in for inspection. Inside they found some
cartons of women's shoes -- and two expensive, late-model sport-utility
vehicles hidden behind a false wall of each container. The cars were legally
registered to Los Angeles residents. After the ships set sail, their owners
reported the vehicles stolen to collect insurance money. The containers and
their cargo were destined for the Republic of Georgia.
Mr. Severino and his team went to the FBI requesting funds and support to
follow the shipments to Georgia, saying that they suspected that the racket
was part of a Chechen rebel funding scheme. The FBI at first refused, saying
that all they saw was a car-theft ring. "Then I showed them the picture of
our businessmen with Basayev," Mr. Severino says. The FBI approved the trip.
"It became clear to the FBI that the LAPD was onto something," says Mr.
Miller, now an assistant FBI director in Washington.
Once in Georgia, the LAPD worked with Georgian authorities and the FBI,
seizing another 14 stolen cars listed on customs manifests as "aid."
Back in Los Angeles, police started to investigate the cars' owners. What
they pieced together was an alleged scheme in which GHS enticed owners to
give the group their vehicles and report them as stolen. GHS would then ship
the cars overseas. According to the LAPD, once the vehicles were in transit,
the owners would report the cars stolen and collect the insurance money. In
Georgia, Chechens close to the banned rebel groups would sell the cars at
several times their U.S. value. In all, the LAPD detectives identified 200
such shipments to Georgia over the past few years, worth at least $5
million. That figure doesn't include losses to the insurance companies due
to fraudulent claims.
Russian authorities have since arrested one Chechen allegedly linked to the
scheme who now faces charges of fraud and possible support for terrorism in
Russia. The trial of the U.S. suspects is continuing in Los Angeles County
Court. Lawyers for the 17 defendants now in custody haven't indicated how
they would plead and have said their clients were unaware of any links to
the Chechen extremists. No charges were filed against the Chechen
businessman.
"This case was a breakthrough in that what we found didn't look like
terrorism: it looked like regular criminal activity but when we followed it
long enough it developed what we believed [was] a nexus to terrorism. But it
is important to note we never made a terrorism case out of it," Detective
Severino says.
Write to Robert Block at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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