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Because of the lack of eyewitnesses, Nosair was acquitted of murder and escaped life in prison, but he went to jail on a handgun charge. Crowds cheered outside the courtroom when the verdict was announced. Later, Nosair would receive a stream of visitors in prison, including many of his friends in the blind sheikh’s circles.

In this air of increasing violence, Mustafa Shalabi tried to make things work with the blind sheikh. He helped Rahman get an apartment in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn. He hosted gatherings at his home, where he introduced Rahman to his circle of followers. Some of them swore bayat—an oath of allegiance—to the sheikh. An Egyptian named Abdo Haggag entered the inner circle, serving as Rahman’s speechwriter. Unlike his peers, Haggag found Rahman to be a hypocrite and eventually turned against him, spying on Rahman for the Egyptian government and (much later) becoming a cooperating witness for the United States.49

The conflict that had played out in Afghanistan between bin Laden and Azzam was repeating itself in Brooklyn through their respective proxies. Rahman was involved with bin Laden. It’s not entirely clear how solid that relationship was, but it was strong enough that bin Laden sent several $5,000 payments to help cover Rahman’s living expenses in the United States.50

Shalabi was sitting on a significant amount of money, at least tens of thousands of dollars, and some reports put the total as high as $2 million. Rahman wanted the money for the global jihad, including Egypt specifically, but with an eye toward a widening conflict that would soon encompass the United States. Shalabi remained focused on Azzam’s vision—Afghanistan first and the rest of the world later.51

Shalabi had also taken money out of the center and opened a shop, with the apparent intention of rolling the profits back into the jihad. Yet questions about Shalabi’s honesty had persisted for years, and some called this theft. In a 1989 memo sent to Al Kifah officers in the United States and abroad, Fawaz Damra, one of the founders of the Brooklyn office, accused Shalabi of embezzling $1 million from the center.52

Damra was forced out of his post as imam of the Al Farook Mosque and sent into exile in Ohio. Omar Abdel Rahman replaced him, but he, too, began to bitterly criticize Shalabi, first for his handling of Al Kifah’s funds and then for his religious inadequacy. The two issues were inextricably linked, as far as the sheikh was concerned, and both were matters of life and death.

Rahman did not enjoy unequivocal support from the community. Al Farook members suspected that he himself was funneling Al Kifah funds for his own purposes, such as supporting his family back in Egypt. Shalabi again won the power struggle, and Rahman was dismissed from his duties at Al Farook. Unlike Damra, however, he would not go quietly.53

Rahman’s loyalists began a whisper campaign against Shalabi that soon grew to a roar. They passed pamphlets around the community warning local Muslims not to trust their money to the Al Kifah Center.

At the beginning of 1991, the tide began to turn against Shalabi. Fearing for his life, he called Ali Mohamed, the jihadist Special Forces sergeant who worked for Ayman Al Zawahiri, and asked him to take Shalabi’s wife and son to the airport, where they flew back to Egypt. Shalabi intended to leave the country himself within a few days, but his time had run out.54

Enter Wadih El Hage, the al Qaeda member from Tucson who had been mysteriously linked to the brutal killing of liberal imam Rashad Khalifa little more than a year earlier.

According to El Hage, Shalabi called the Arizona Muslim and invited him to New York to look after the Al Kifah office while Shalabi flew to Pakistan, possibly to make his case with what remained of Abdullah Azzam’s organization back in Peshawar.55

On March 1 neighbors found Shalabi dead in his South Brooklyn apartment, a stain of dried blood beneath him. His death had