Lunchtime Heist

Something didn't look right. There he was on his hands and knees in the corner next to the ATM ten feet inside the burger joint. It gave you a little pause but you thought you'd proceed regardless. Someone at the front table was muttering something to him, the sounds lost amidst his chewing. Your bag got stuck in the doorway and, by the time you got unstuck, he had gotten up, turned around and was now facing you as you entered. 2:15 was later than normal for you, the upside was that you had missed the lunchtime rush: the place was a little empty.

For whatever reason you looked him up and down and took in the rest slowly. It didn't feel right. A gray hat haphazardly lay atop his head. A jacket: not quite a technician's jacket, nor even a UPS jacket, more like a fashion piece. You looked downwards as he stepped towards you. His hand brought up a bag from behind, he was gripping it tightly. You'd seen the money bags that the couriers use - this was the financial district after all, you see the couriers all over downtown San Francisco. This wasn't a regular bag. Puzzling.

And of course there was the sheepish grin that he was sporting. That definitely looked out of place. No gun that you could see... Still you dismissed your impulse to tackle him. "Whatever, you're imagining things." You walked past him towards the counter. He nodded imperceptibly as you crossed - still smiling you noted, and began to walk out.

As you made your way to the front counter, you continued to put it all together. "Must be missing something. Didn't look like a technician, nor a armored car courier... Surely he won't walk out of here just like that. Wasn't holding a gun, but could he? Why the smile? Anyway let me order."

Just in case, you tried to fix his features in your memory, late forties, brown hair beginning to gray, white guy, looked a little like Chevy Chase. You wondered if you'd make a good witness.

"May I take your order please."
"The special. No drinks... Hmm..."

You figured you should vocalize something about your disquiet. "Umm ... The guy..", you gesture. "Umm, the ATM.. the machine. Umm"

You turned and looked back to the front of the restaurant and noticed that the guy had indeed walked out. Oh well. Then the clincher: the ATM didn't quite look right. You turn towards the server and begin again: "Umm... The guy..."

Someone appeared by your side, impatient and loudly put the words out there:

"You know that someone just robbed your ATM machine."

That's it, that's what didn't look right. The bottom half of the ATM had swung out into the lane. The cheek of it, he even left the door open. You gesture. The newcomer repeated his words:

"You know that someone just robbed your ATM machine."

The woman taking your order was a little perplexed at first - perhaps it was the language barrier. She was also a little annoyed. The two men in front of her were departing from her script. You remained tongue-tied but Citizen Alert proceeded to spew out the details. Eventually, as he got no response, he asked, "Call the manager." She gestured to the manager and the other servers and grunted a name. Then:

"May I help who's next?"

You never quite liked that awkward formulation, surely she could have said "whoever's next" but the grammar pedant in you, let alone the intrigued potential crime witness, decided to step aside. Your order would be ready in a few minutes.

"Next."

You shuffled to the side and turned to look again at the front of the restaurant. Those now entering the restaurant all raised their eyebrows as they passed the evidently-open ATM. An alarming sight you assumed. You'd never seen the inside of an ATM before - well perhaps on the way out. A few diners started pointing towards the ATM but on the whole, there there was a lot of apathy in this joint. Perhaps it was the time of day, perhaps everyone needed a siesta. Or maybe it was just the nature of the place. Lee's is a tad above a McDonalds but it isn't quite a gourmet Barneys. Well you get what you pay for. You decided to take things in.

The manager eventually sauntered out from behind the counter and walked towards the front, chatting all the time on his cell phone. The newcomer accosted him, as did a few others: amplifying and explaining their consternation. The manager didn't seem impressed and continued his phone conversation. Minutes passed and a little group formed around the ATM bending down and examining it. One guy kept saying "ATM machine" and this again bothered you: you thought "machine" was redundant given the acronym. Eventually someone decided to call the police.

Your order arrived, you picked it up, thanked the server and walked over to the gathering at the front. You wanted to get a look at the ATM. Well, who knew?

You wondered how the robber managed to open the ATM and how long he'd been fiddling with it. Did he have a key or tools?

You heard someone say "He must have been a technician."

At that you smiled and shook your head. You said to no one in particular, "He just walked out with a bag of money and left the ATM open! Come on now."

You wondered how many other joints the robber would be targeting. It was a pretty brazen heist but it worked. The managers would be like the present one - unconcerned since the ATM had nothing to do with them. The clientèle would likely be as lethargic as today's version and, well, no one would be a hero. Indeed you were one of the few people who noticed anything anomalous or could have even attempted to stop it. Of course you didn't, proving the point.

You wrote your name and number on a sheet of paper and gave it to the manager in case the police cared - you didn't have time to hang around for them. Four or five others claimed to have gotten a good look at the guy and they all looked excited about their brush with notoriety. As you reached the office a few blocks away you started to hear the sirens.

You've been hibernating for the past few months; perhaps you too have been behaving like everyone in the restaurant: quiet and simply minding your own business. You need to get back into things, find your voice again. Don't let others just walk all over you and snatch your soul. Come on now.

You passed by the joint the next day and noticed that the ATM was no longer there. You kicked yourself for not having photographed the open ATM. You went to another lunch place. The sign was still outside however: ATM inside.

Soundtrack for this note

Nas - Thief's Theme

File under: life, crime, heist, theft, brazen, apathy, San Francisco, toli

Of No Fixed Abode

My initial response to the 2005 London bombings was in the vein of whimsy: London's got soul, a trilogy celebrating the place, my favourite town. I then considered a case of identity theft last year to kick off the present Things Fall Apart series. After the news of the past few days, I can now give you the second part of a trilogy focused on the people. This time a look at my "fourth man": the fifth bomber, a man of no fixed abode. Some notes ripped from the headlines, a few musings and some poetry...

• "Thought to be Bukhari": A Paper Trail
• A Redacted Note
• Reflection
• "Of No Fixed Abode"

"Thought to be Bukhari": A Paper Trail

You lived with him
You stole his name...

They trained you well
Your name is cursed...

No one knows the identity of this man who performed the identity theft.

— Identity Theft

---

Identity:

[Redacted] 32, from West London. A Ghanaian, his real name is thought to be Bukhari. Said to have abandoned his bomb at Little Wormwood Scrubs after losing his nerve. Represented by Stephen Kamlish, QC.

— 21/7: the trial, January 16, 2007

---

Motivation:

Mr Kamlish, representing [redacted], said to Mr Ibrahim: "You wanted to do a copycat of 7/7 - four bombs on 7/7, four bombs two weeks later on 21/7. That was your plan.

"We say your 21/7 bombs were to be bigger and better in your twisted thinking than that of 7/7.

"Four real bombs on the Tube and one block of flats, a tower, destroyed, going up in a ball of flames. That was your plan, wasn't it?"

— Man 'planned tower block blast', March 22 2007

---

During the trial the man I called cursed continued to be referred to by his alias and that inevitable suffix, "of no fixed abode".

Tricksters, gremlins and parasites; who is which?

Mr Kamlish said his client - who the jury was told was really called Sumailia Abubakhari - was "used and abused" by Mr Ibrahim who was a "cowardly, manipulative schemer".

21/7 suspect 'saved tower block', April 17 2007

---

On Tuesday, he took to the witness box for the first time and told the court his real name was in fact Sumaila Abubakhari and that he is 28 - not 34. Wearing a crisp white shirt, dark blue tie and grey suit, [redacted] said he came to the UK in December 2003 using a passport in someone else's name and applied for the Army. He said he did not consider what countries he might be sent to on active service.

— Ghanaian suicide bomber 'wanted to join Army', April 17 2007

Muddied waters:

A terror suspect dismantled a bomb and saved the lives of people living in a tower block, his lawyers have claimed...

Prosecuters say he was the fifth bomber who allegedly lost his nerve at the last minute.

But Stephen Kamlish QC, defending, said his client had ditched his bomb - made of hydrogen peroxide and chapatti flour - at Little Wormwood Scrubs after "making it safe".

Woolwich Crown Court heard claims he also dismantled a booby-trapped sideboard at a "bomb factory" allegedly set up by a co-defendant in Curtis House, New Southgate, north London.

Mr Kamlish said: "He's not asking for any applause, but if he hadn't have done it and it was a bomb that actually worked ... he was in fact responsible - potentially - for saving the block and all the people in it."

Mr Kamlish said his client - who the jury heard was really called Sumailia Abubakhari - was "used and abused" by Ibrahim, a "cowardly manipulative schemer".

The barrister told the jury that [redacted] had been under intense pressure, and was even threatened by another defendant, since deciding to "break ranks".

He described his client as a "decent" and "somewhat childlike, sometimes naive" man.

— 'Not Asking For Applause', Sky News, April 17 2007

---

A theatrical man, he makes good copy with his African emotions; consider the headlines generated in under an hour a few months ago:

• 21/7 suspect 'is a devious liar', BBC, April 17 2007
• 21/7 suspect 'encouraged to lie', BBC, April 17 2007
• Accused breaks down in court, BBC, April 17 2007
• 21/7 suspect 'defused booby-trap', BBC, April 17 2007
• 21/7 suspect 'saved tower block', BBC, April 17 2007
• 21/7 suspect's claim 'is amazing', BBC, April 17 2007
• 'Bomber' admits lying to police, BBC, April 17 2007

A compromised man:

Anthony Jennings QC, defending Hussain Osman, accused Mr [redacted] of crying when he told police about his supposedly dead father.

Mr [Redacted] has since admitted that his father is still alive.

"You were doing exactly what you were trying to do to this jury, which is pull the wool over their eyes by starting to cry when you were lying," said Mr Jennings.

The barrister went on to accuse Mr [redacted] of being a "self-confessed liar", a "fraudster", and a "sly and devious liar".

Mr [Redacted] denied lying, saying: "I was remembering the time as I'm staring death in my face and you're telling me not to cry?"

— 21/7 suspect 'is a devious liar', BBC, April 17 2007

---

Bukhari or Abubakari?

The prosecution says his real name might be Sumaila Abubakari but his nationality is unclear.

'Bomb plot' trial, BBC, April 17 2007

Bukhari or the other moniker Abubakari are Muslim names typically found in West Africa (from Northern Ghana, Nigeria to Sierra Leone). In Ghana at least, the north is much poorer and less developed than the rest of the country. Northern muslims tend to settle in the zongos (slums). Regardless of nationality, the experience of these dwellers is much like that in the slums of Nima, rough and hardscrabble lives. As an often itinerant people, they are deliberately opaque and insular. This served them well in their dealings with the colonials and beyond but this opacity gives rise to much uncertainty as in the present case. We simply don't know what the nationality is.

---

• 21/7 suspect speaks of fear (video)
• 21/7 suspect 'not a fanatic' (video)

Emotional:

Mr [Redacted], who is said by the prosecution to have lost his nerve and dumped his device, has said he was not a "fanatic".

He told the court he left the device he was given in a west London park as he "just wanted to get rid of it".

He said Mr Ibrahim had told him the devices would "not hurt anyone".

He told the jury: "It didn't make sense to me. I didn't know whether this was hoax or real or anything to do with terrorists.

"But I didn't want anything where the police got involved in it.

"I thought: 'I don't want to listen no more. I have heard enough. I just don't want to have anything to do with it." ...

At one point, Mr [redacted] needed several minutes to compose himself in the witness box.

He broke down after telling the court of how Mr Ibrahim demonstrated the rucksack device on the morning of 21 July 2005 - two weeks after suicide bombers struck in London on 7 July 2005.

"He started to explain for the first time as if he has been talking to me before," Mr [redacted] told the court.

"I was waiting for him to tell me if this was a suicide bombing or not.

"This was my belief, that this was going to be a suicide bombing because it just happened two weeks ago."

He told the court: "I wanted to live. I wanted to have a good life. I wanted to support my family. It is just something that I have never thought of in my life."

— 21/7 accused breaks down in court

Lies and Truths:

But he agreed with Mr Sweeney's description that he had lied to police on an "epic" scale, including not telling them his real name, religion or background, about buying the peroxide or what he did after the "attacks" had failed.

He said: "It is unbelievable when I look back at these lies...I lied about the whole day of July 21."

Mr Sweeney said: "You lied through your teeth as to who the bombers were."

[Redacted] replied: "Yes I did. I did not want to associate myself with them after realising what they had put me through."

[Redacted] denied lying to cover up his own guilt, maintaining that he was initially manipulated by co-defendant Muktar Said Ibrahim to follow the story that the attacks were meant only to be a hoax but realised once the trial had started that he had to tell the truth.

— 21/7 suspect 'lied on epic scale' April 27, 2007

---

Assessment

The jury deliberating the cases of the alleged July 21 bomb plotters was today discharged after failing to reach a verdict on the final two defendants.

The decision by the trial judge, Mr Justice Fulford QC, came during the eighth day of deliberations by the jury at Woolwich crown court in south-east London.

He asked prosecutors to decide by tomorrow whether they want to seek a retrial for [redacted].

— Jurors fail to reach verdicts on two 21/7 defendants, Guardian, July 10, 2007

• Jury deadlocked in UK transit bomb case, AP, July 10, 2007

The jury was discharged yesterday after failing to reach a decision on two other defendants, [redacted], both of whom deny conspiracy to murder.

[Redacted], 34, of no fixed address, ... will face a retrial, prosecutors said today.

— Four July 21 plotters jailed for life, The Guardian, July 11, 2007

A Redacted Note

It has been known since September 2005 that the man I called cursed, a man of "no fixed abode" and now "thought to be Bukhari" was not the man his identity papers claimed, yet in the proceedings of the trial and the journalistic coverage, he is continually referred to with his stolen name. Perhaps this is as it should be, the slow workings of the law and the wheels of justice, an administrative decision. Yet each mention of the name is an open wound for a family in Ghana and London, a reminder about the continuing trauma in their lives. We are all collateral damage, the walking wounded of these interesting times.

I'll note in passing that the western journalistic tic of attaching an age and provenance to every name leads to the stilted formulations of the copy we have seen. Indeed these details detract from the heart of the matter and obscure rather than enlighten the complexities of this very human story. As we have seen, the name, age and nationality are still undetermined and the reporting has been wrong throughout. The only certainty is that he is "of no fixed abode". If we do have to name, place and date in tangible words, I suggest in this case that we stick to the following:

"[redacted], undetermined age, unclear nationality, of no fixed abode"

Reflection

A few more leading indicators to round off our notes:

Al-Qaeda has responded to the U.S. intelligence focus on young Arab men as potential risks, he says, by recruiting "jihadists with different backgrounds. I am convinced the next major attack against the United States may well be conducted by people with Asian or African faces, not the ones that many Americans are alert to."

— George Tenet: Tenet Details Efforts to Justify Invading Iraq, April 28, 2007

No country is immune from these things, consider this clipping from last summer:

Two Nigerians, whose identities were not disclosed at press time, have become victims of the exchange of artillery fire between Israeli authorities and Hezbollah forces in Lebanon.

Two Nigerians Confirmed Killed in Lebanon bombings, July 24, 2006

The footsoldiers of The Great Game know no boundaries, indeed their variety is a historical commonplace.

So when I watched the recent protests in Kyrgyzstan, I thought not to the recent people-power outings in Ukraine and Georgia or even to the collective courage that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall (not pope-inspired by the way). Rather I thought back to Christmas 1990 sitting in Nancy, France, watching images from Bucharest alongside a true-believer socialist as his worldview finally succumbed to that ineffable and unrelenting pull of gravity.

It is no comfort to have learnt, as I did a few years later, that there were Ghanaians who died fighting for that reptilian man, Nicolae Ceausescu, alongside his Securitate during the Romanian overthrow of that macabre communist regime. I thought about the kind of world in which someone would send young Ghanaian men to train in interrogation techniques in far-flung places like Cuba, East Germany and Romania to come back and oppress their people.

I thought about what it meant for a young man to find himself in that position, in a foreign land, dodging bullets and shooting at people, in their own country mind you, trying to overthrow a rotten regime. I thought about how miserable and brutish their lives must have been to have undergone that kind of journey. And what about their peers who did come back from their various schools of grist to wreck havoc on their compatriots? I'm sure that some of these trained killers are among those who carry out weekly armed robberies in our towns.

— Strange Bedfellows and the Journalistic Impulse

Perusing these notes, the obvious questions remain unanswered. Depending on where you stand, the actors range from convenient scapegoats like John Walker Lindh, to the convinced and morally convicted ciphers such as Richard Reid, to the more ambiguous cases like that of the man I call cursed. There is perhaps a full spectrum of responses: from moral courage, through the mistaken and misguided indiscretions of youth, to moral midgetry. That is the terrain of fallen angels.

As with all things about the human factor and the theatre of our existence, our fall from grace perhaps renders this melancholy mystery unknowable. One cannot but stare at the trainwreck when it comes. But how does one equip oneself to face the abyss? Where does one buy soul insurance? In a dark time, perhaps social living is the best.

"Of No Fixed Abode"

Identity theft
Open wounds

Fallen angels
Damaged goods

Brutish living
Scarred consciences

Devious schemers
Lost nerves

Enemy combatants
Collateral damage

Modern travellers
Prison shelters

Stolen verdicts
Jury deadlocks

Bomb factories
Moral blinders

Hostile lives
Fractured dislocations

Cultural interplay
Social living

The aliases of exiled souls
Alienated, "of no fixed abode"

Soundtrack for this note

• Antibalas - Indictment
  An angry afro-beat meditation with dissonant horns that presents a bill of goods, if not some articles of impeachment, on our current situation. The song is also a humourous indictment of all those rogues in a musical court of law. One wished everyone expressed their grievances in music or words. The cover art is prescient about the flight of that man "thought to be Bukhari", the confusion and urgency are the same, as is the mistaken resort to violence. It is the mask of a man of no name, of indeterminate age, of unclear nationality and of no fixed abode. The only missing thing is the discarded, bomb-laden rucksack.
  
  
  
• Prince - Reflection
  A simple song: light drums and an acoustic guitar that sticks in your head and gets you singing along before you know it. The melody is wistful and, befits the title, reflective. We're reminiscing about innocence lost, the good old days when decisions were without consequence and life itself was carefree. Not everyone has that luxury but we can all empathize with that sentiment

  Sometimes I just want to sit out on the stoop, play my guitar just watch all the cars go by

• Angie Stone - Soul Insurance
  Her warm voice endears as does the music; Angie assures you that she has got your back. Soul assurance. Soul insurance. Where do I sign up for mahogany soul?

Update August 29, 2007

The following passage should give much pause for those sympathetic to this man "thought to be Bukhari"

He said that Mr Omar had offered a bed to a mentally ill African refugee, took in a homeless Indian man and paid visits to people in hospital. He never heard Mr Omar speak out in support of any act of terrorism. Mr Dixon said: "He was against the Iraq war, but... he said nothing radical." Mr Dixon became an unwitting helper of the alleged conspirators when he accompanied Mr [Redacted] on a trip to buy dozens of litres of hydrogen peroxide, the chemical that formed the key ingredient of the rucksack bombs.

— Witness was unwitting helper with 21/7 purchase

So not only did [redacted] use people unwittingly to help buy bombmaking equipment but, if my reading is correct, he also stole the identity of that "mentally ill African refugee" who his accomplice had taken in. No one has connected these particular dots but I would lay even odds that said refugee was indeed the man who woke up to learn that the police were calling him a bomber. That would certainly round out the circle of infamy of tricksters using anyone who falls into their orbit. One wonders if there really are any more shades of gray to this story.

Next: Ode to Betty Brown

File under: London, Ghana, bombing, terrorism, loss, waste, crime, anomie, identity, theft, reflection, globalization, Africa, culture, immigrant, diaspora, observation, perception, poetry, Fallen Angels, Things Fall Apart, toli

On The Wire

A blogospheric parable of sorts...

In the midst of discussing Porter Goss's upcoming (or rather ongoing) pogrom of those in the CIA who tried to leak just enough to cause Bush to lose the elections, Matt Yglesias reaches out to The Wire and cites Omar

"If you come at the King, you'd best not miss"

Brad Delong counters with a more classical reference from Alessandro Farnese

'He who draws his sword against the prince needs to throw away his scabbard.'

Arcane Gazebo then trumps both pointing to Cersei Lannister

"When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die."

As someone whose professional life has been spent trying to develop software tools that allow serendipitous group-forming this is all music to my ears. Not to mention that I'm also a fan of the show being discussed and admire its sense of language.

If I was a Clay Shirky type, I'd be talking about how such exchanges are the natural outgrowth of the confluence of ease of publishing with tools like Blogger and Moveable Type, standards like Atom/RSS, HTML and XML, the ubiquity of REST-ful platforms based on HTTP, URIs and distributed hypermedia as well as search infrastructure like Google and Technorati that has come to terms with end-to-end intelligence and the virtue of the link.

I'd say all that and more. I'd add in some theory about how this infrastructure is helping us harness those beneficial network effects bounded by Metcalfe's Law and Reed's Law. That such fun and informed repartee is the endpoint of contributors from Gutenberg on etc.

Now I suppose that policy wonks and Berkeley economists would be inevitably part of the same community. But would someone like me have been able to add in my own take in this debate without that great global water cooler conversation engine that is the blogosphere?

Surrounding all this commentary is the shared context of a novelistic TV show. It helps to have to some artist mining the cultural zeitgeist, the kind the social lubrication I pondered in that Sign Of The Times piece. This is what sociologists like Elster call The Cement of Society: the shared cultural context of literature, music, religion, history, film and, yes, also the infrastructure that smoothes these exchanges.

I'm positive that this is what David Simon and Ed Burns set out to do when they conceived of the show. They have assembled a fine set of writers who weave these gritty urban tales together. To my ear, it's probably novelist George Pelecanos (now also a producer on the show) who authored Omar's line. It's the kind of classicism I've read in some of his works like The Big Blowdown and Soul Circus. In this season, they've also reached out to such crime novel stalwarts as Dennis Lehane and Richard Price. I'd also note the as yet unheralded Rafael Alvarez who was the conscience of the Greek dockworkers of the second season. With such fireworks in the writing department, boosted by an amazing cast and strong direction by the likes of Ernest Dickerson, it stands to reason that we'd be drawing on its lessons in our own discourse. The framework they have set down is quite simple: Baltimore city as a character, bureacracies on both sides The Law and The Street, the occasional mavericks, doomed but sympathetic characters like Bubbles and an ear for language that rings true to life. So now let me add some more fodder to the conversation from The Wire.

Consider the always quotable Proposition Joe wrapping up a Godfather-like gathering of drug crews in a conference room in a Baltimore hotel, the dealers have just decided to set aside lethal differences to combine resources to buy better drug product from New York.

"For a cold-ass crew of gangsters, y'all carried it like Republicans an' shit."

Isn't that akin to the coalition that came together to re-elect Bush?

Or from the democratic standpoint, what about Blind Butchie who notes in his inimitable trancelike way:

"Conscience do cost"

when Omar has to cough up $1,500 to retrieve a cop's lost gun and return it to the authorities. Detective Bunk's tirade about predatory people like Omar (who incidentally was only a few years behind him in high school) touched a nerve and Omar tries to asuage the unease Bunk raised when he evoked the old days

"We had us a community back then".

Doesn't that stand close to the kind of wrangling half of the country is going through (and the rest of the world I might add) as it anticipates what will be lost of its soul in the next four years under Bush?

Excusing the street ebonics if you will, I tend to agree: conscience do cost.

File under: crime, culture, literature, technology, toli, tv, classic, technology, crime, police, drama, writing, novelistic, conversation, thewire, Baltimore, web, serendipity, blog