The wreck of a limo near Albany was the deadliest U.S. transportation disaster in a decade. And the man behind it was one of the most notorious confidential informants in FBI history. Ben Ryder Howe reports
Photo-Illustration: Mark Harris. Photo courtesy of of the National Transportation Safety Board This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
At 1 p.m., Lisinicchia pulled the limo up to a home in the town of Amsterdam. Axel Steenburg, a 29-year-old bodybuilder who worked at a semiconductor plant, was organizing a 30th-birthday celebration for his wife, Amy, and a big crew. Seventeen of them, including Amy’s three sisters, Axel’s brother, and several other young couples, were going day-drinking at Brewery Ommegang in Cooperstown, some 50 miles away.
A Jeep came up from behind. Its driver, Holly Wood, a worker for the county government, noticed the limo had its back-up lights on yet was inching forward. “That’s weird,” she said to her daughter, who was sitting shotgun. Wood turned down the radio, lowered the window, and heard the bleat of the limo’s back-up alert. Through tinted windows, she could see the passengers’ silhouettes. Lisinicchia was pointing toward something in the distance. Wood passed the limo and drove on.
Nauman Hussain was informed about the crash by a call from a New York State trooper. “Is this a prank?” he asked. Four days later, he was arrested at a traffic stop outside Albany and charged with criminally negligent homicide. News photographs from his arraignment show a muscular young man in a black V-neck shadowed by his glowering older brother, Haris.
Shahed Hussain undercover in 2003. Photo: FBI / Department of Justice The impact of Hussain’s FBI cases was not confined to the region. They were legal landmarks in the War on Terror, helping establish the legitimacy of secret evidence, warrantless wiretapping, and the government’s practice of inventing terror plots to entrap ordinary Americans with no prior connection to violent Islamic groups.
The charges he faced were serious, with national-security implications: Several of the 9/11 hijackers had used illegal licenses. Hussain was in danger of being deported. But the FBI was desperate to discover potential terrorists in the United States, and the agency offered him a deal to become a confidential informant.
As far as getting the men to participate in or endorse violence, the sting was a bust. But that didn’t matter. Neither Aref nor the pizzeria owner ever reported Hussain or his jihadi bombast to law enforcement. The government deemed that this was itself an indication of wrongdoing. The men had “failed” a “test,” as a prosecutor put it, and in 2004 the Justice Department charged them with a range of crimes, including money laundering in support of terrorism.
The FBI paid to relocate the Hussains to Memphis, Tennessee. They were no longer welcome in Albany, where the Muslim community regarded Shahed Hussain as “the lowest of God’s creations on earth,” according to Shamshad Ahmad, a co-founder of the mosque where Aref had preached. With $60,000 in compensation for his undercover work, Hussain resolved his identity-fraud charges with a guilty plea and a fine of $100.
The Hussains did not last long in Memphis before returning to Albany in 2006. That July, the burned shell of the family’s former home was purchased for $450,000, more than three times its former value. Hussain used the windfall to purchase the Hideaway Motel, an establishment near the Saratoga Springs racetrack. He renamed the property the Crest Inn and shifted the business model, renting squalid bungalows to low-income residents whose stays might be paid for by the state.
On the night the FBI arrested Williams and his associates, agents raided his mother’s apartment, kicking down her front door. “They came out in helicopters, in gas masks,” she recalls. “I was on the toilet. I said, ‘You gonna let me wipe my ass?’ They was standing right there with a big dog. So I wiped my butt, and I showed him the toilet paper so he could see the shit on it.
David Williams has spent much of the past 12 years in the Pollock Federal Correctional Institution in Louisiana, often in solitary confinement. The prison is nearly 2,000 miles from his family, who haven’t visited since 2015. As Elizabeth McWilliams describes his ordeal, she begins to shake violently and has to leave the room. “I never was a person that thought about killing somebody,” she says quietly when she returns. “I have that in me now. I feel like I could kill somebody.
The 72-year-old Riaz began his career as a modest clerk, then became a military contractor. As the army became the de facto ruler of the country, he leveraged an unparalleled facility for bribery into one of the largest real-estate portfolios in Asia. The alleged beneficiaries have included the son of the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan; in 2019, without admitting guilt, he agreed to a settlement with the U.K.
Michael German, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice who spent years investigating terrorism for the FBI, told me that from the government’s point of view, an informant who is deceptive and transactional is neither unusual nor frowned upon. “Based on his documented criminal history and success in recruiting people into sting operations, the FBI clearly knew they were utilizing a talented manipulator,” German says of Hussain.
The New York State Police had taken charge. It moved the Excursion to its headquarters, and for the next week, Sumwalt’s investigators were forced to stand in a pen at a distance as troopers took it apart inside a tent the NTSB had helped pay for. The agency took the extraordinary step of going to the media to complain but even then gained little ground.
“I like finding records,” he says. “It takes time. You have to drive to the courthouse, and you have to know which door to go in. And then you have to be nice. A lot of reporters are jerks.” Rulison’s obsessive reporting — largely undertaken in the small hours, on his wife’s computer in the family playroom, after filing his quota of regional business dailies — has added layers of intrigue to the limo story.
“Things always seem to work in their favor,” he adds. “They get a lot of mysterious breaks.” In 2014, Nauman and Haris Hussain were pulled over on Interstate 787. According to the police, Haris, who was driving, had a revoked license with 28 suspensions. Both were brought to a station where officers learned that the brothers had been ticketed more than 70 times and that Haris had repeatedly used his brother’s identity to avoid arrest.
A vigil for the Schoharie victims. Photo: Cindy Schultz / Reuters/REUTERS As the families waited for the district attorney to prosecute Nauman Hussain criminally, they considered their options for a civil lawsuit. The NTSB concluded that the state’s “ineffective oversight of Prestige” had been a probable cause of the deaths, but it is extremely hard to sue the government for a disaster like the one in Schoharie.
The criminal case against Nauman Hussain concluded on a Thursday afternoon in early September. Anticipating an angry and overflowing crowd, court officials converted the Schoharie High School gym into a makeshift courthouse. A bomb squad swept the locker rooms and the cafeteria, and police officers watched as 100 or so people filed in. The victims’ families, wearing sneakers, T-shirts, and hoodies, occupied a space near a podium.
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