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Con man key to terror convictions
Feds initially didn't believe admitted liar, scam artist who later became star witness
Ahmed George Alami:
A computer image of Egyptian travel papers contained a picture of Hmimssa.
HmimssaMaurice Castillo:
The name on a birth certificate given to Hmimssa by Abdel-Ilah Elmardoudi in July 2001. This was to serve as a template for Hmimssa and a way for him to create a new identity.
Edgardo Colon:
The Puerto Rican name he used to travel back to Morocco in 1997 from Chicago. He used the name in some credit card deals, too. The IRS notified him that the Social Security number associated with that person was already being used by someone else.
Andreica Gheorghe:
The phony Romanian identity created for Hmimssa in Chicago by an Armenian. He used this to acquire an Illinois ID and a Social Security card.
Moustopha Haboub:
Hmimssa had a Moroccan passport and Iowa driver's license in this name.
Scott Hardy:
Name first used when Hmimssa was nearly arrested in Chicago while trying to steal computers from an Office Depot. It was such a bad fake he quickly quit using it.
Jilali Ikadour:
Used when Hmimssa rode the bus from St. Paul, Minn., to Detroit while on the run from authorities in Chicago. It is "an old-fashioned Moroccan name that is no longer used," he said.
Cesar Claude Medina:
Name found on an Iowa license with Hmimssa's picture when he was arrested. He also had a Social Security card in that name. Hmimssa rented a locker in Medina's name that contained equipment suitable for making counterfeit visas, Social Security cards and an immigration form. Hmimssa had a French passport in Medina's name. He said the alias was provided by Elmardoudi.
Youssef Nadifi:
Name found on a French passport with Hmimssa's picture.
Michael Saisa:
A World Identity Card and two passport pages in that name had Hmimssa's picture. Hmimssa also had a U.S. visa and Social Security card in that name. These were among the documents that Hmimssa was guilty of possessing in his plea agreement.
Jean Pierre Tardelli:
A name on what appeared to be two pages of a French passport with Hmimssa's picture.
Youssef Tigani:
Name found on a purported U.S. visa with Hmimssa's picture. The visa also made reference to a bogus Moroccan passport in that name. Hmimssa had an unsigned Social Security card in Tigani's name in a locker in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Diomande Vassiafa:
The name, also listed as Diomand Vaissia, found on a purported U.S. visa with Hmimssa's picture and making reference to a Lebanese passport. It might have been Hmimssa's first alias. It was the one he used in Romania as a black market currency trader. He got the name from a Palestinian living in Israel.
Patrick Vuillaume:
Used to enter the United States in 1994. Hmimssa used it to apply to graduate school at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago.
Hmimssa also had a U.S. visa in the name of Rauf Rizvi of India, but it had Brahim Sidi's picture on it. Hmimssa also had a purported U.S. visa for Hussein Mohsen Safieddine with a picture of a man believed to be George Labibe.
Source: Court records and testimony
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DETROIT — When he was arrested in September 2001, career con man Youssef Hmimssa found himself in an unusual position: stuck in a Detroit jail cell with no chance of getting out.
He was looking at up to 81 years in prison for $180,000 in fraudulent credit card charges in Chicago. By the time federal authorities nabbed him in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he was also linked to a suspected terror cell in Detroit.
It is clear that Hmimssa, a Moroccan immigrant who had spent more than a decade drifting across North Africa, Romania and the United States, had good reason to cooperate with federal prosecutors in the nation’s first terror trial following the September 11 attacks.
He ended up being the central witness against four Detroit men. In June, a jury convicted Abdel-Ilah Elmardoudi and Karim Koubriti of conspiring to provide material support or resources to terrorists. They convicted Ahmed Hannan of possessing false documents and acquitted Farouk Ali-Haimoud of all charges.
Still, questions about Hmimssa continue to cloud the case in which Hmimssa played a leading role. A gag order again bars federal officials from discussing Hmimssa or the case, but a senior investigator said an ongoing review of the government’s case by a special prosecutor now focuses largely on classified reports involving Hmimssa.
In a meeting in November 2001 with FBI agents, they said they didn’t believe Hmimssa and left the interview after only an hour. But by August 2002, the government pinned a terrorism case largely on his words.
In his first nine months in jail, Hmimssa, now 33, evolved from a man who repeatedly insisted he knew no terrorists to the government’s crucial witness against four men he fingered as Islamic radicals bent on mass murder.
In five days of damning testimony, Hmimssa claimed to know their terrorist objectives and rattled off potential targets: the Ambassador Bridge, Comerica Park, Disneyland and Las Vegas. He said the men scouted Detroit Metropolitan Airport looking for gaps in security and wanted to acquire Stinger missiles to shoot down planes.
Who is Hmimssa?
But among the many questions still surrounding Hmimssa is the most basic: Who is he?
Nine months after the terror trial ended, government officials still are trying to confirm that Youssef Hmimssa is his real name. They have been wrong before: In May 2001, authorities in Chicago charged him with fraud under the name Patrick Vuillaume, a mistake not corrected until after his Iowa arrest four months later.
What is known is that Hmimssa is an admitted scam artist and liar. Even the jurors who convicted three of the Detroit men said they had trouble believing his testimony.
During the terror trial, U.S. District Judge Gerald E. Rosen pointedly asked an FBI agent how he could be sure Hmimssa wasn’t fooling them the way spies are taught to lie to others.
Federal officials have turned over more than 100 pages of material to Rosen, including classified records maintained by the Central Intelligence Agency that deal with Hmimssa. Others are so secret that they must be viewed at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.
In the end, Rosen must decide whether to grant the defendants a new trial and whether to accept a plea agreement that substantially cuts Hmimssa’s prison sentence.
It is clear that investigators handled Hmimssa differently than most witnesses in Detroit. During at least 20 hours of questioning with Hmimssa in which he discussed terrorist plots, FBI agents here stopped taking notes.
That practice isn’t illegal but is viewed as suspect, judges have noted in other cases. What is known of Hmimssa suggests he is especially untrustworthy.
Shadowy existence
Hmimssa has lived a shadowy existence, traveling a succession of poor countries ripe for scammers. Hmimssa speaks five languages and has a strong grasp of computers. Testifying before the U.S. Senate Finance Committee in September, he astounded legislators with the intricacies of how to steal credit card numbers — and even offered tips to prevent credit fraud.
He grew up in Casablanca and in 1990, at age 20, he said he chose to leave Morocco. From there, he said he wanted to move to Italy, but with the 1991 Gulf War looming Europe wasn’t as accommodating, Hmimssa said.
Instead, he found trouble in Libya and Romania. He visited Turkey, Syria and Egypt. He passed through Algeria and Tunisia.
Hmimssa testified that while in Romania, his passport was stolen, forcing him to get his first phony ID.
In Bucharest, Romania, Hmimssa admitted he was arrested during a transaction involving stolen watches. He promised police there that he would cooperate in the case. Instead, he fled.
He went to Timisoara, a city in western Romania near the border of three countries. It was there that Hmimssa became an illegal currency trader for organized crime. There, too, he got in trouble and escaped by using an alias.
Using a phony French passport in the name of Vuillaume, Hmimssa came to the United States in 1994 and settled in Chicago. While there, he went to Northern Illinois University to learn computer science.
Hmimssa said he worked in Chicago for Equant Services installing computer systems for major business clients including Cisco, AT&T and the Chicago Stock Exchange, all while still using an alias.
As in Romania, Hmimssa would claim that he was a victim of crime, forcing him to become a criminal. This time, Hmimssa said he wasn’t paid for two months of work.
“I became crook. I became scam artist. ... I didn’t have money, I didn’t have any choice,” Hmimssa later testified. But Hmimssa admitted that he had dabbled in credit card theft in Chicago before he was allegedly cheated out of money.
“I was just doing this kind of practice, but I did not intend to scam at that time,” he said of his earlier efforts.
Soon Hmimssa had mastered identity theft. Hmimssa drove a taxi in Chicago and stole credit card information from unsuspecting customers.
He located a childhood friend, Mourad Madrane, who moved from Wisconsin to be with Hmimssa in Chicago. Before long, the two worked in tandem to steal credit card information from customers at the suburban Chicago chophouse where Madrane worked as a waiter.
“I started doing it for gas, then for food,” Hmimssa said. “Then I became too greedy, started buying electronic items and sell to other people for this money.”
In five months, Madrane and Hmimssa stole at least 384 credit card numbers and ran up charges totaling $180,000 in purchases and sales of the cards to others. By the time authorities uncovered the scheme, there were plans to spend another $172,000 with the cards, court records show.
Hmimssa’s crimes went undetected until he mistakenly handed a clerk two different identification cards while trying to buy computers with stolen credit cards.
In May 2001, federal authorities nabbed Hmimssa, thinking he was Vuillaume, and charged him with theft and fraud in Chicago. He agreed to cooperate, but instead jumped bail and became a fugitive. He said it was because investigators wanted him to work surveillance on a dangerous man.
Detroit connection
At the time of his arrest, the investigators found he had four aliases. They also suspected he may have entered the country illegally and might have had an international warrant for his arrest.
Hmimssa said he drove to St. Paul, Minn., then took a bus to Detroit because of its large Arabic population. In Dearborn, he met the men he would later say tried to recruit him to join a terror cell.
Hmimssa created at least one additional alias and was working with one of the accused terrorists on creating other false documents when he left Detroit in the summer of 2001 for Cedar Rapids.
But in September 2001, with federal authorities sweeping the globe in search of terrorist suspects, Hmimssa’s time on the run would come to an end. He was linked to the suspected terror cell in Detroit, making him a priority fugitive. Secret Service agents and local police captured Hmimssa in Cedar Rapids on Sept. 28, 2001.
They also found a cache of phony visas, passports, Social Security cards and other immigration documents. They found that he used at least 12 aliases and also had bogus documents for at least two others as well.
Hmimssa later smiled in court when he remembered a question he asked when agents in Iowa asked him to sign a document. “I told them that I’m not sure what name should I use. ... Because, in Chicago, I was indicted under Patrick Vuillaume.”
Connected to suspected terrorists in Detroit and with fraud charges pending in Illinois, Michigan and Iowa, Hmimssa was looking at a lengthy prison sentence if convicted. The fraud charges alone carried up to 81 years behind bars.
At first Hmimssa denied knowing anything about terrorists. By August 2002, however, he had become the backbone of the government’s terror charges against the four men in Detroit.
In April 2003, Hmimssa pleaded guilty to 10 felonies in three states with an agreement with prosecutors that he would serve no more than 46 months. With a chance for credit for time served, by the time he took the witness stand in the terror case he was literally halfway home.
Source: Court records and testimony.
You can reach Ronald J. Hansen at (313) 222-2019 or rhansen@detnews.com.
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