|
by John Pacenti
Cox News Service
August 2, 2002
Randy Glass sits in a back booth of a downtown sushi
restaurant. He's talking a million miles per hour on how he, one of the
country's most consummate con men, found redemption in foiling
terrorists for the federal government.
"I was a rogue, a scoundrel. I'm not that person
anymore," Glass said. "When I realized the magnitude of what I got
involved in, I realized I had to stand up, do the right thing and be a
patriot."
It's a fantastic tale. One, given Glass' history, many
would find hard to believe. But it's backed up by reams of documents and
secret tapes detailing the Boca Raton former jeweler's work as a
government informant.
It's backed up by prosecutors and government agents.
It's backed up by the arrests last year of four men as a result of the
government sting into the sale of Stinger missiles and other weapons to
terrorists.
Court documents and undercover audio tapes indicate
that Glass, pretending to be the "money man" for a network that could
provide stolen weapons, rubbed elbows with those aiming to get weapons
to Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks.
Glass, 50, now says these suspected terrorists made
comments to him during one incredible meeting at a New York City
restaurant in 1999 that the World Trade Center would be turned to
rubble.
But few wanted to listen to a former con man.
Now everyone is listening.
Glass is about to get what he's been aiming for since
his release after seven months in prison in March: recognition.
"Dateline" told his story Friday night on national television nearly a
year after The Palm Beach Post detailed his undercover work for the
government.
West Palm Beach attorney Val Rodriguez, who
represented Diaa Mohsen, one of arms brokers whom Glass helped put in
prison, called Glass' sudden celebrity "a big joke."
"It's like everybody's falling for it," Rodriguez said
Friday while on vacation in the Austrian Alps. "The U.S. Attorney's
Office is falling for it. The press is falling for it. That guy is like
'Mr. Fraud.'"
Rodriguez said that Glass was the one who entrapped
Mohsen, an Egyptian national who was Glass' gambling buddy, and fellow
accused arms broker Mohammed "Mike" Malik, a native of Pakistan. The
sting also netted Wall Street high-flier Kevin Ingram and his pilot
sidekick Walter Kapij for trying to launder money for illegal arms
sales.
Mohsen, Ingram and Kapij all were sentenced to prison
for terms ranging from 18 months to 33 months. Malik remains free in New
Jersey.
"I guess Malik is the new Randy Glass," said
Rodriguez, adding the main reason he pleaded out Mohsen was because he
felt a fair trial was unattainable following the events of Sept. 11.
Malik's attorney did not return phone calls.
Glass' detractors have plenty of ammunition. Back in
1998, Glass was facing serious time for 13 felonies stemming from the
bilking of jewelry wholesalers out of $6 million. After he offered the
government his services, Glass ended up pleading guilty to two charges
and, rather than the maximum 51-month sentence, he got seven months in
jail.
The gem scam wasn't his first con by far. Glass is so
convincing he once persuaded some desperate Pompano Beach home owners to
take some "rare" postal stamps for their residence, according to police
records.
"I've done many things that I'm sorry for. There is
nothing I can do but not repeat that behavior again," Glass said. "But
then I took a chance of doing the right thing when my normal instinct
was to be self-centered."
Glass says public documents, sealed records as well as
well as audio and videotapes verify everything he is saying about the
31-month arms investigation. He says the audio tapes show there was no
way Mohsen and Malik were entrapped.
In one recorded phone conversation, Mohsen tells Glass
he knows a guy "who is very connected to the Taliban" and whose money is
provided by bin Laden.
Glass confirms the government is now reviewing the
whole South Florida sting and there could very well be more arrests.
U.S. Rep. Ben Gilman has called for an investigation. "The government
knows about those involved in my case who were never charged, never
deported, who actively took part in bringing terrorists into our country
to meet with me and undercover agents," Glass said.
"They wanted to purchase sophisticated weapons systems
up to and including nuclear material and radioactive isotopes to make
dirty bombs to be used by terrorists to hurt Americans."
Government agents who worked with Glass on the sting
call his actions "heroic."
"Obviously, it looks like he did what he did to get
out of a jam but Randy went way beyond what he had to do," the agent
said. "He put his life in danger. He was threatened at undercover
meetings. They threatened to kill him and he kept going."
And the terrorist sting wasn't Glass' only case. He
helped the government recover a 30-carat diamond stolen in armed
robbery. He helped recover stolen Picassos and two Egyptian burial masks
said to be 30 centuries old. He even, with the aid of his young son,
helped police make a felony battery case against an ex-Marine in the
beating death at Boca Raton teen party that got out of control in
February 2000.
But it was the arms case that sent Glass all over the
world where he put those same skills he used as a con artist to use.
"The individuals that Mr. Glass has dealt with are
essentially terrorists. They are without question dangerous
individuals," Assistant U.S. Attorney Neil Karadbil told a judge on May
19, 2000, in sealed records that asserted bin Laden was a player in
trying to get Stinger missiles and other high-tech weaponry.
The government had to beg U.S. District Judge Wilkie
D. Ferguson to allow Glass to remain out of jail to continue his work as
an undercover agent.
Repeatedly, the team found itself running into a
lack of support. They could not get prosecutors to approve wiretaps. A
FBI supervisor in Miami for that agency's terrorist task force refused
to front money for the sting, forcing federal agents to to use money
from U.S. Customs and even from Glass to help keep the sting going,
Glass said.
One of the most startling developments during the
investigation occurred on July 22, 1999, at the TriBeca Grill in New
York where Glass, wearing a wire, met with a man referred to in court
documents as Abbas, believed to be a Pakistani government agent brought
in by Malik. Glass was informed that they wanted to buy a whole
shipload of weapons and they said it was for bin Laden.
"At the meeting Abbas said Americans are the enemy and
they will have no problem blowing up this entire restaurant because its
full of Americans," Glass said. "As we leave the restaurant, Abbas turns
and says, 'those towers (the World Trade Center) are coming down.'"
Despite that information, available to the
government two years before the World Trade Center attack, the FBI's
terrorism task force didn't appear to take the threat seriously, Glass
said.
But the group of agents he worked with in South
Florida continued to develop their leads.
"The agents that I worked with at the FBI, the
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and U.S. Customs, America needs more
agents like them," Glass said. "These agents were absolute patriots."
Glass wants to see stricter immigration controls and
profiles of visitors from known terrorist nations. He adds that it's
imperative that, regardless of political belief, that Americans need to
stand behind their government and support the current Administration.
"I have been face to face, eyeball to eyeball with
these people," he said. "And though nothing has happened since Sept.
11, we can not afford to be lulled into a false sense of security
because these people won't stop until they destroy our very way of
life."
John Pacenti writes for the Palm Beach Post. E-mail:
jpacenti(at)pbpost.com
Copyright 2002 Cox Enterprises, Inc.
Return to Table of Contents |