In Padilla’s Metamorphosis Into Al Muhajir, Fla. Provided a Turning Point
by Manuel Roig-Franzia and Amy Goldstein, Washington Post
SUNRISE, Fla. - Sometimes the young man with the faintest hint of a mustache and the thick, dark eyebrows said he was black. Sometimes Hispanic.
He was Jose, then Ibrahim, then Abdullah. Catholic, then Muslim. A defiant street tough, then a compliant religious student.
Whether he was searching for an identity or trying to conceal one, the man born Jose Padilla lived in a state of perpetual and often dramatic evolution. Yet little in the itinerant history of this son of Puerto Rican immigrants would foreshadow his becoming an object of national fascination, an enigmatic figure accused of plotting with al Qaeda to terrorize his fellow Americans.
If Padilla created any legacy in his 31 years, it was one of underachievement. The man who became Abdullah al Muhajir - the man who federal authorities believe was scouting out possibilities involving a radioactive “dirty bomb” - had failed in school, dabbled clumsily in Chicago street gangs, built a record of mostly minor crimes and held a series of minimum-wage jobs.
Many facts of his life, and of the plot he stands accused of abetting, remain unknown. But the road that led him to Egypt, then Pakistan, then Switzerland and then to his arrest at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport on May 8 goes back to South Florida.
He was making $5.60 an hour chopping tomatoes and onions at a Taco Bell north of Miami when he took the name Ibrahim and gravitated toward the Muslim faith in 1993, according to the restaurant’s manager, Mohamed Javed.
Padilla’s attraction to Islam coincided with a time of upheaval in South Florida’s Muslim community, as the moderate temperament of its mosques and Islamic institutions became mingled with new anti-American vitriol and talk of jihad.
An early tutor in his adoptive religion was Raed Awad, the leader at the time of the al-Iman mosque in Sunrise, a suburb northeast of Fort Lauderdale where Padilla lived. Awad was also a fundraiser for the Holy Land Foundation, a group based in Texas whose assets have been frozen by the Bush administration because of allegations that it channels money to the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, which the United States has listed as a terrorist group.
Another influential figure in the community was Adham Hassoun, who founded the South Florida chapter of a large Muslim charity, Benevolence International Foundation. U.S. officials alleged in court documents in April that the Illinois-based foundation has been intimately connected to Osama bin Laden for years and has moved large sums of money to fund the operations of his al Qaeda network around the world.
The foundation’s Florida office was a five-minute drive from the Taco Bell where Padilla worked.
Although it is unclear whether Padilla and Hassoun ever met, extremists gained a foothold in the Muslim community of the early- and mid-1990s by focusing largely on young people and recent converts, according to Walid Phares, a Florida Atlantic University professor who specializes in international terrorism. Padilla was both.
Hassoun gave speeches at the University of Miami, saying Muslims had a duty to participate in religious wars and to kill infidels, recalled Diana Elson of Coral Gables, Fla., who heard him speak at the university’s Institute for Retired Professionals. Elson remembers being chilled by the message.
The radicals’ voices “were unstoppable,” said Phares. “They became actual spiritual leaders and motivators.”
Coincidence or not, it was the same area that most of the hijackers who took part in the Sept. 11 attacks would pass through a half-decade later. Last summer, a dozen of the conspirators lived briefly in South Florida apartments, many of them in Broward County, where Sunrise is located.
Earlier, as he studied and worshiped with Awad at the al-Iman mosque in Sunrise, Padilla also took courses at one of the area’s most liberal Muslim schools, the Darul Uloom Islamic Institute in Pembroke Pines. Padilla did not speak Arabic and would have been hardly noticeable during the Saturday morning classes if it had not been for his distinctly conservative attire, said Maulana Shafayat Mohamed, leader of the Darul institute.
Padilla almost always wore an Arab shawl on his head, Mohamed said, “like Yasser Arafat.”
By then, Padilla had officially changed his name to Ibrahim and embraced his new faith with a fervor that startled his mother, Estella Ortega-Lebron. A former neighbor in Chicago, Nelly Ojeda, recalled that Ortega-Lebron said she thought her son had joined a cult.
A Boy Called ‘Pucho’
He had traveled far from his Roman Catholic roots. As a child growing up in Chicago, Padilla went to Mass every Sunday at St. Sylvester’s with his mother and siblings, former neighbors said. Padilla had been born in Brooklyn, but the family had spent most of the first five years of his life in his mother’s native Puerto Rico before moving to Chicago in 1975.
Padilla’s father, Jose Osvaldo Padilla, is deceased, though the date of his death is unclear. Padilla’s mother had a child with Ojeda’s brother, who lived with her in Chicago. Their son, Ilan Ojeda, 24, is being held in a Broward County jail on an attempted murder charge after being arrested, one week before his brother’s May 8 arrest, for allegedly stabbing a man with a pair of scissors during a fight outside a Sunrise convenience store.
While in Chicago, Padilla and his family lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a three-story rowhouse in Logan Square, on the city’s west side. He was close to his mother, said Ojeda, who lived in the same building. The kids gave Padilla the nickname “Pucho” because he had chubby cheeks, and the name bounced off the walls of the Darwin Elementary School, where he went.
“He wasn’t remarkable in any way,” said Craig Tatar, assistant principal at Darwin. “He was intelligent but didn’t live up to his potential, unfortunately.”
The family lived in a neighborhood where packs of teens ruled the streets and gang recruitment was a rite of spring, Tatar said. Violent gang rivalries reached an apex while Padilla was in elementary school, Tatar said, though he doesn’t believe Padilla became involved until high school. Padilla soon joined a west side gang called the Maniac Latin Disciples.
“People used to stay away from him because they knew he was a gangbanger,” said a 16-year-old boy who knows some of Padilla’s former gang associates.
Padilla’s criminal troubles began to mount. He learned the local drill, almost always using phony names after being arrested, but he was sloppy. Sometimes, he even used his family’s North Albany Street address with the fake names.
In 1985, when he was 15, he was involved in a street scrap in which a youth was stabbed to death. Padilla bungled his escape, running past an unsuspecting police officer who stopped him to find out why he was in such a hurry. He hadn’t stabbed anyone, but he was sent to the juvenile center for three years.
After he got out, he was busted for stealing doughnuts from a convenience store and punching out the owner; there were trespassing and marijuana infractions, plus an arrest for holding up traffic by flashing gang signs.
His schooling appears limited. Three of his high school years were spent in the juvenile center, where he took courses at an alternative school, though it’s unclear whether he earned a diploma. When he filed name-change paperwork in 1994, he listed his job title as “maintanace” in big, uneven, childlike handwriting.
From Ibrahim to Abdullah
After his family resettled in Florida, in 1990, Padilla took jobs at the desperate end of the economic scale. He made $200 a week working at the Hilton in Sunrise and, later, on the banquet setup crew at the Holiday Inn in nearby Plantation. His salary at the Hilton suggests that he worked in the food and beverage department, housekeeping or laundry, said Rick Welch, the hotel’s current general manager.
Padilla’s propensity for violence persisted. In October 1991, he fired a shot at a motorist during a road rage incident. The motorist, who was not injured, took down Padilla’s license plate number, and it did not take police long to find him.
He served 10 months, between October 1991 and August 1992, in a Broward County jail. While there, he was charged with assault after a shoving incident with a guard that was broken up by other guards.
After getting out, he lived with his girlfriend, Cherie Maria Stultz, and took the job at Taco Bell, where she had been working for several months. Javed said he did not know that Padilla had a criminal record when he hired him, but the manager remembered Padilla as a good worker who “did anything we asked him to do. . . . We didn’t see any signs of any aggressiveness or hostility.”
In early 1993, after about six months on the job, Padilla told Javed that he had taken the name Ibrahim. Javed, the founder of a Muslim school in Sunrise, knew his employee had taken the shahadah oath, a declaration of faith that marks a conversion to Islam. But Javed refused to change Padilla’s name tag because the name change was not yet official, and Padilla accepted the decision without argument. Stultz, who is from Jamaica, converted around the same time, taking the name Marwah, Javed said.
Padilla quit a few months later but didn’t say why, Javed said. Several months after that, he said, Stultz quit, too. Later, Javed would hear periodically about his former employees attending mosques and Islamic institutes in neighboring communities.
Padilla went on to work briefly with the maintenance crew at the Coral Ridge Country Club, according to court records. It is his last known job.
He and Stultz married in 1996, in a simple courthouse ceremony in Broward County presided over by a deputy clerk of court. On the marriage license, Padilla’s race was listed as black.
The couple moved into a one-bedroom apartment in the Inverrary Club apartments, a neat, gated complex in a shabby neighborhood of Lauderhill. Their unit faced a lake and cost $560 per month.
The complex had a mixture of newcomers - recent arrivals from Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the countries of South America. But the couple had few neighbors who matched their new identity. “We have a couple of Muslims there - not a lot,” said Lynn Zovluck, who managed the legal department of the complex’s property management company.
The marriage foundered sometime after Padilla and Stultz moved into the apartment. They separated in 1998, and Padilla disappeared from Stultz’s life.
Stultz moved to nearby Davie. The landlord at her apartment complex said he never saw her husband after the separation. “She was always here by herself,” said Steven Harbin, who manages the Nova Arms apartment complex, where Stultz lived from sometime in 1999 until February.
Many months after they separated, Stultz called her mother-in-law to say that she was filing for divorce. That was when she learned that he had gone to Egypt. Awad, the former imam in Sunrise, told the Florida Sun-Sentinel that Padilla was continuing his religious education at Al-Azhar University in Egypt. The university, whose faculty includes a large percentage of fundamentalists, offers scholarships to non-Arabs.
She “had no idea where he was,” said Linda Smith, a Miami attorney who represented Stultz in their divorce, which became final last year.
Shortly after arriving in Egypt, Padilla married an Arab woman and fathered two children, according to U.S. officials. When Stultz spoke with Padilla’s mother, she gave her an address on Mustafa Basha Street in Cairo. But people living on that street said they didn’t know the woman.
From there, Padilla’s travels were outlined by U.S. officials:
He traveled periodically in the Persian Gulf area. Late last year, while U.S. troops fought in Afghanistan, he went to Pakistan and met for the first time with Abu Zubaida, the senior field operations officer for al Qaeda.
There, investigators believe, he learned how to wire explosives and used the Internet to study techniques for making “dirty bombs.”
In March, Padilla met for a second time with Abu Zubaida and other al Qaeda leaders to plan an exploratory mission to the United States. Padilla left Pakistan in April, flying to Zurich and staying there for three days before returning to Egypt, officials said. A month later, he left for the United States, flying again through Zurich and landing in Chicago, where federal agents were waiting for him. He is now being held at the Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, S.C.
Before he was captured, though, Padilla might have done a favor for his al Qaeda friends. He acquired a replacement passport using the name Padilla in March after reporting that his had been either stolen or lost, officials said. If the report was a ruse and Padilla actually gave his original passport to someone else, it would be a big gain for any terrorist group looking to gain easy access to the United States, a senior analyst said.
But even as he clung to his birth name on an official document, Padilla was establishing a new identity for himself, adopting another Arabic name, with a surname that means “immigrant.”
Ibrahim had vanished, going the way of Jose. He is Abdullah al Muhajir, for now.
Goldstein reported from Washington. Staff writers Robert E. Pierre and Nancy Trejos in Chicago, Howard Schneider in Cairo, Walter Pincus in Washington, special correspondent Catharine Skipp in Florida and researcher Margot Williams contributed to this report.