so when you look at this case, in its pieces, it s cigarette smuggling. so what? the credit card fraud and identity fraud, yawn. and that s by design. it allows this organization to fly below the radar. but when you realize that you are dealing with terrorists. that they re going to export this innocuous criminal activity with lethal effectiveness, it changes the entire perspective of this. they re taking the proceeds of these crimes and sending it to a terrorist organization that prior to 9/11 killed more americans than any terrorist organization. we continued to watch them for a long period of time without moving against them. to ensure that this case was successful. my concern was sleeper cells can be activated to conduct an activated attack based on something totally unrelated to where they are. when are you trained to think in terms of worst case. worst case is an attack on the homeland. we few that this cell had weapons and they were conducting firearms practice with hand
rick swine being passionate and emotional, we had to peel him off the ceiling. i had no idea if we were going to execute tomorrow or never. ken and i decided we had to get to d.c. and we needed to convince her in a very compelling way that this needed to go forward. so a lot was riding on that from into d.c. so we went and had a meeting with the attorney general sitting at the head of a long conference table. you know, it was a stressful setting. because, all right, we spent years now doing this. we re ready to go. and attorney general reno started asking questions about in the search warrant affidavit it says hezbollah terrorists. the attorney general was very hypersensitive about calling people terrorists when you re not arresting them for terrorism itself. and said you are arresting them for racketeering, credit card fraud, cigarette smuggling, money laundering, and you are calling them terrorists in this affidavit. that needs to come out.
and they see me come in the door. right away, here comes the fbi swooping in to take our case. say stop, before you say more, everyone in this room will sign a non-disclosure agreement. they re like, what? i think that s the first time in my then 15 years as a prosecutor i had to do that. it was very dramatic. bob had to sign non-disclosure agreements. we were going to brief him on the intelligence case and ties to hezbollah. so they started walking us through essentially the case the atf had been working on with the cigarette smuggling. several slides and surveillance gathered and we were both where is this going? i d say this is not a tobacco tax evasion scheme. they put a slide up on the screen of eight men and said there is a hezbollah cell in charlotte. and the room goes quiet. bob s a really good briefer. so when he gave that presentation to ken and u.s. state attorney attorney, it was compelling. it was compelling.
says, you look familiar. i said, well, i played soccer with you one sunday. i guess he figured out if i was playing soccer with him, i really knew everything i needed to know about his life. he had this recognition on his life that he was in big trouble. we had a staging area at the national guard armory, we processed and fingerprinted all these guys. with you took them to a room and mirandized them. we talked about the cigarette smuggling and the credit card fraud and the ailians identifications. i alias identifications. he really talked and talked and talked. after several hours, we got him something to eat, he finally looked at me and said, put your pen down, stop writing. and i said, okay. i put my pen aside. he said, i know why you are doing this to me. you want hdbouk. you want hezbollah. dbouk.
people terrorists when are you not arresting them for terrorism, itself. and said you are arresting them for racketeering, credit card fraud, cigarette smuggling, money laundering, and you are calling them terrorists in this affidavit. that needs to come out. the attorney general looked over at one of her subordinates and said you and kenny chris go in the other room and work through this long story short, with highwayed to rewrite the search warrant affidavit and take out every word the justice department found offensive. 102 pages. we went through it line-by-line with a ruler so we fixed the affidavit to their satisfaction. we caught the next plane out. we called bob clifford. we said verbally over the phone, get ready to go. and so on july 21st, 2000, at 6:00 in the morning with 250 agents, three s.w.a.t. teams spread out in various organizations, i gave the order, execute.