The Associated Press
December 29, 2006 Friday 4:40 PM GMT
LA police bust shows new terror-fighting tactics
By ROBERT BLOCK, The Wall Street Journal
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.
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.
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 percent and overall crime was down by more than 4
percent.
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.