When Bobby Farid Hadid, an Algerian merchant marine, was twenty-three, he discovered that a pay phone in a train station near the Algerian shore was broken. He could call anywhere in the world free. He dialled the country code for the United States, followed by ten random numbers. Sheilla Jean-Baptiste, a young Haitian-American in New York, picked up the phone. “Hello, America?” Hadid said.
They both spoke French. They discussed their ages, their jobs, and their races. Hadid described himself as “light.” Jean-Baptiste said she was black, and asked if that was O.K. She was eager to “make a friend from far away,” she said. Hadid began sending her postcards and calling her from ports around the world.
They corresponded for four years, and in 1994 Hadid applied for a visa to America, where he hoped to find work. Two marines on his company’s boat had been assassinated by Islamist insurgents, and he no longer felt safe in the shipping industry. He didn’t know English, but he said that “it sounded like music to me: the rhythm, the way they pronounce the ‘h’ sound using their throats.”
A week after arriving in America, Hadid, who was Muslim, met Jean-Baptiste at her parents’ home. “He had one of the most welcoming faces,” Jean-Baptiste said. “He wanted to know about every little thing—who, what, why?” Within a month, they married. To understand her husband’s upbringing, Jean-Baptiste, who was Catholic, began reading the Quran.
Hadid rented a pushcart and sold hot dogs at Thirty-ninth Street and First Avenue. A few people mocked his accent, slipped him fake money, or threw buns at him, but for the most part Americans were “open-minded, funny, beautiful,” he said. After working as a vender for a year, he was hired by Pitney Bowes to repair copy machines. On his days off, he drove a cab. At night, he lay in bed replaying the events of his day, thinking, What did I do today—did I achieve something?
On September 11, 2001, four of his colleagues at Pitney Bowes died in the attacks on the World Trade Center. Hadid watched the television for hours, crying. He thought, I have to protect this beautiful country of ours. I want to move this country forward, even if it’s just by a millimetre. He enrolled at the training academy for the New York City Police Department, which was seeking Arabic speakers. As a child, he had hidden under his bed when he heard police sirens, but now the N.Y.P.D. sounded like “paradise on earth—the money, the shield,” he said. He became an officer in July, 2002, at the age of thirty-five. On the wall of the couple’s living room, in Astoria, Queens, he hung a two-foot photograph of the Twin Towers.
Jean-Baptiste was skeptical about his new career, but, she said, “I kept my opinion to myself.” His friends were less discreet. “The N.Y.P.D. is against minorities,” one told him. “Why are you going against your own community?” Hadid explained his reasoning by describing American traffic court. “Even the person who gets a parking ticket can confront the cop in front of a judge,” he told them. “That’s democracy, that’s freedom. In this country, you can fight anyone.”
Hadid thrived within the police hierarchy. The captains and lieutenants, whom he always called Cap and Lou, felt to him so superior that they seemed otherworldly. He was promoted from monitoring traffic at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge to translating and transcribing wiretaps, and then to the vice team. In 2005, he was one of only forty officers to receive a nearly perfect score on the department’s language exam, earning the title “master linguist” in Arabic and French. A year later, he won a meritorious commendation from the commissioner for infiltrating a high-end prostitution ring. He dressed in a suit and a tie, exaggerated his accent, and persuaded a madam to lead him to a room where twenty Japanese teen-agers were being held. “He brings to the Police Department a special talent,” a supervisor wrote.
In 2007, Hadid was promoted to the rank of detective and approved for a top-secret security clearance. He became a member of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, a cell of investigators and analysts who work with the F.B.I. “I think I fulfilled my American dream,” he said. He had a jolly, exuberant presence, and he easily cultivated confidential informants. He warmed them up by chatting about shared holidays and wedding rituals. In Algeria, he had taught himself a dozen Arabic dialects by watching movies with subtitles. In an evaluation that year, he was described as “an accomplished linguist who utilizes his Arabic language skills to the benefit of all” and “maintains the highest level of Police Ethics.”
Hadid often prayed during his lunch breaks. His family had never been particularly religious—his sisters didn’t cover themselves, and, aboard the marine ships, he used to drink and gamble—but Jean-Baptiste had converted to Islam four years into their marriage and now wore a hijab. When she began studying the Quran, he decided to reread it. They had three sons who went to Islamic Sunday school, and he wanted to be able to answer their questions. “It was embarrassing that I come to America, and they end up showing me my religion,” he said. “That’s my ego.” He tried to adhere to the five pillars of Islam, but only when they didn’t interfere with his work. He explained his approach by repeating a French saying: Il faut suivre la mode ou quitter le pays—“You have to follow the fashion or leave the country.”
After five years on the force, Hadid was asked to work as a French interpreter on his first homicide. The body of a young Sicilian waiter, Angelo Guzzardi, had been found in a dumpster in Brooklyn a few days before 9/11. The case had gone cold.
Hadid flew to France with two Brooklyn detectives, whose parochialism made him self-conscious. “They could not even use the bathroom without me,” he said. Working alongside French officers at the Paris Police Prefecture, they interrogated a Congolese-Frenchman, Marien Theophile Mbossa Kargu, who had shared an apartment with Guzzardi in Brooklyn during the last week of his life. Kargu had drawn suspicion after he falsely told friends that Guzzardi had died in the Twin Towers. For nine hours, Kargu insisted that he knew nothing about his roommate’s death.
The next day, the detectives interviewed Kargu’s girlfriend, Leïla Grison, who had lived in Brooklyn with Kargu and Guzzardi. She was half Algerian. Hadid told her in French that he, too, was Algerian. Her son was biracial. Hadid had biracial sons, too. “I was using everything I had,” he said. The detectives gave her coffee, food, soda, and cigarettes, but she wouldn’t talk.
After three hours, Hadid tried what he called his “last resort,” focussing on hannana, an Arabic word for the love a mother feels for her child. “I am giving you my word right now,” he told her. “If you tell me exactly what happened, I promise you are going to spend tonight with your son.” She started crying and asked for another cigarette. Then she began speaking more slowly. “I could feel it in her voice,” Hadid said. “She is tired and wants to get it over with.” She confessed that her boyfriend, who was angry at Guzzardi for giving her cocaine, had inadvertently killed him in a fistfight while she was at the laundromat. When she returned to their apartment, Kargu was on his knees, sobbing. “It was an accident,” he told her.
As soon as Kargu learned that his girlfriend had given him up, he confessed, too. He said that he had tried CPR and then contemplated calling the police, but his “mind went in circles.” He said, “The fact of being black and to have caused the death of a white man—this created a panic inside of me.” He wrapped Guzzardi in a garbage bag and then dropped the bag in a dumpster. Kargu and Grison flew home to Paris that night.
After the confessions, Hadid and the detectives stepped out of the interrogation room and hugged one another. Hadid told them, “You got your collar.” They stood on the copper roof of the police station, overlooking the Seine, and took photographs. In one, Hadid wears a black suit with a wide red tie, and his gold shield hangs from the pocket of his blazer. He looks triumphant and a little cocky.
The next day, Hadid’s colleagues flew back to New York, and Hadid stayed in France to visit his sister, who lived in Lille. At her house, he received a call on his cell phone from Grison, who was crying. “Please, can we just talk for few minutes?” she said. He reluctantly agreed. “I felt obligated to talk to her because of what she did, helping us to not only solve the case but to put the father of her son behind bars,” he said.
Just before leaving for the U.S., Hadid met with Grison for twenty minutes at an outdoor café in Paris. Hadid was accompanied by his cousin and her son, who played nearby while they talked. Grison felt remorse for betraying her boyfriend, and she asked whether he would be extradited to America. When Hadid said that he couldn’t talk about the case, she began crying again. “You did the right thing,” he told her. “You have a tranquil conscience now.”
A few weeks after Hadid returned to New York, Grison e-mailed him to wish him a happy New Year. Hadid showed the e-mail to Jean-Baptiste, who was sitting in the living room with two of their sons. “My whole family wishes you the same,” he wrote in response. “Very good year full of happiness, prosperity, good health and overall lots of success and good hope in this life.”
Hadid and the other two detectives were awarded Certificates of Appreciation by the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office, and Detectives of the Month by The Gold Shield, a publication of the N.Y.P.D. union. A few weeks after he returned to New York, Hadid was promoted to sergeant. “I was very proud of that,” he said, “and I felt that I could never do enough to say, ‘Thank you, the United States, and God bless you. Thank you.’ ” He fantasized that, after twenty years with the force, he’d get a job in politics, maybe even end up as an aide in the White House. Once, when he and another sergeant were on Thirty-ninth Street, he said to him, “Can you believe the guy standing next to you used to sell hot dogs on this block?”
A month after he returned from France, he was summoned to the office of David Cohen, the deputy commissioner for the department’s Intelligence Division. Formerly a deputy director at the C.I.A., Cohen was appointed after 9/11 to “protect New York City from another terrorist attack,” he said. Under his direction, the Intelligence Division began treating the Muslim faith as a cause for scrutiny. The division’s new Demographics Unit sent confidential informants to infiltrate mosques, as well as cafés and bodegas, and to collect the names and license-plate numbers of congregants at religious services; video cameras were sometimes installed outside the mosques. The rationale for the surveillance was outlined in a report, “Radicalization in the West,” published by the Intelligence Division, which suggested that sites where Muslim men congregate could be “incubators,” encouraging people to embark on a path from “preradicalization” to “jihadization.” “Indicators” of radicalism included “growing a beard” and “becoming involved in social activism.” One of the sites that the N.Y.P.D. targeted was a mosque near Hadid’s apartment, where he had prayed for more than ten years.
Cohen said in a deposition that he was impressed by Hadid’s “good record of comportment,” and his “valuable experience on terrorism-related issues,” adding that “those reasons were connected to our interest in building and sustaining a counterterrorism intelligence program.” He wanted Hadid on the Citywide Debriefing Team, a secret arm of the division that was created under Cohen’s watch and that operated out of the same building as the Demographics Unit, in Chelsea. Hadid hadn’t known it existed.
Hadid and another sergeant, Frank Garcia, were tasked with supervising a team of eight officers, who interviewed arrestees at precincts, at central booking, and in their homes, gathering intelligence on “travel routes, trends, patterns, tactics, techniques and procedures which may have a nexus to terrorism as well as information on criminal activity,” as one department report put it. The people they interviewed were often immigrants, who had been arrested for petty offenses, like possession of marijuana, driving without a license, or disorderly conduct. The detectives wrote detailed chronologies of their lives, including the names and phone numbers of their relatives, and documented the contents of their wallets or pockets: bank statements, business cards, scraps of paper containing a MySpace password.
At the end of the interview, the arrestee was usually asked to become a confidential informant. “They said, ‘We’re going to send you to bodegas, to mosques, to places where your people hang out, and all you have to do is listen,’ ” Hadid told me. Occasionally, detectives would promise to help the arrestees with their immigration status. “They said yes because of the fear and the pressure,” Hadid said. They were referred to a different unit, and Hadid never heard from them again.
On his new desk, Hadid placed English, Arabic, and French dictionaries, the N.Y.P.D. patrol guide, a small statue of Bob Marley, and the Quran. Against the wall of his cubicle, he propped a copper-plated picture of Al-Aqsa Mosque, in Jerusalem. Hadid said that he was approached by four analysts from the Intelligence Division who asked to look at the picture. He was happy to chat about the mosque. “It’s one of the holiest sites in Sunni Islam,” he told them.
Every few weeks, the Citywide Debriefing Team was told to focus on a “country of concern.” The nations were chosen by examining what the “current threat picture looked like,” Thomas Galati, the commanding officer of the Intelligence Division, said in a deposition, explaining that they were trying “to find those people that were radicalized towards violence.” One week, the team was instructed to debrief people from Tunisia. “This is one of my areas of expertise,” Hadid told his supervisor. “Do you have anything more specific? Do we know what we are looking for?” Hadid said that his supervisor replied, “Any Tunisians.”
When no country of concern had been designated, Hadid said that the detectives reviewed a list of the arrests made in New York City in the past twenty-four hours. “They’d look for Muhammad, Abdul, Daoud, Akbar, Hussain,” Hadid said. The arrestees were sometimes questioned for up to four hours. Hadid said one detective insisted that if a person was looking forty-five degrees to the left he was lying about the details of his life. “Some of them cried,” Hadid said. “They got very shaky. They were just in shock.” Muslim arrestees were frequently asked to reveal the mosque where they prayed, and on which days; the schools their children attended; the airline they took when they arrived in America; how often they returned to their homeland; the jobs and addresses of family members back home; whether they’d gone on pilgrimage to Mecca or fasted on Ramadan. A Palestinian-American, arrested for an improper left-hand turn, felt compelled to tell Hadid and another detective that he was hoping for peace in the Middle East, and that he wished people would “know the true nature of Islam.” In the report of his debriefing, the Palestinian-American is described three times as “nervous” and five times as “evasive.” Hadid said, “Inside, I was laughing. I mean, come on, we are supposed to be fighting terrorism.”
Once, Hadid said, after his team interviewed a parolee at his home in Queens, a detective filed a debriefing report that drew attention to an Arabic video, “The Message,” resting on the man’s television stand. The movie, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1978, chronicles the birth of Islam and stars Anthony Quinn. “It’s a beautiful movie,” Hadid told the detective, laughing. “What’s the big deal?” The detective told him that the movie is about Muslims killing one another. “I have the movie,” Hadid said. “You should interrogate me.”
Hadid tried to participate in as few debriefings as possible. “What they were doing was wrong—it was completely stupid,” he said. “I was not going to go there and be part of that.” He spent more time in his office, in Chelsea, reviewing the debriefing reports filed in the past few months. “I like to read, and when I read I study—I go into depth,” he told me. Of nearly six hundred reports filed in the past year, he was alarmed by how many reports focussed on Muslim men, when only three per cent of New Yorkers are Muslim. In the files, he came across a report about one of his neighbors, who had recently complained about being detained at J.F.K. airport. Hadid became worried that, as a result of the reports in the Intelligence Division’s database system, people’s names were being flagged when they travelled. Two members of the Citywide Debriefing Team were stationed at J.F.K., where they assisted with T.S.A. inspections and researched travellers’ histories, reservations, and payment methods. Hadid advised his detectives not to file debriefing reports unless they had information about illegal activity, a policy consistent with the department’s Patrol Guide.
Often, the detectives ignored him. The Citywide Debriefing Team documented all their interviews, regardless of whether the reports contained intelligence. “We had to generate them to show that we were working,” Frank Garcia, the other sergeant overseeing the team, said in a deposition. In an e-mail with the subject line “The Numbers game again,” Garcia told the officers, “We must play the game.”
Rumors circulated that Hadid had been denied a top-secret security clearance, which was not true. Donald Powers, the commanding officer of the Intelligence Division’s Investigations Unit, said in a deposition that he heard Hadid “had only been granted a secret clearance, not a TS clearance,” and interpreted it as “some type of warning.” He assumed that there had been “derogatory information” in Hadid’s record, he said, because “there is usually a negative reason why you’re not granted that.” A memo summarizing a private meeting between a lieutenant and a sergeant in the Intelligence Division noted that Hadid “refused to give up his Algerian citizenship and voted in the last Algerian elections.” (Hadid had retained his citizenship—“I’m not going to forget my roots,” he said—but he hadn’t voted in the elections.)
After Hadid had been with the unit for five months, seven senior officers in the Intelligence Division held a meeting about him. According to a memo that outlined the conversation, the group discussed whether he was travelling in the city alone, without a partner, while on duty. There was also concern that Hadid’s office was “in close proximity to the Analytical Shop,” where confidential paperwork was kept. The memo said, “Hadid disappeared on Fridays to attend prayer service.”
Cohen ordered the Investigations Unit to start an internal probe of Hadid. An integrity-control officer, William Brosnan, “will conduct surveillance,” a memo said. In a deposition, Cohen explained that Brosnan would investigate “if there is a pattern of departures at a certain time, certain day—whatever it is—and simply monitor Sergeant Hadid’s movement at roughly those times to see where he goes.” Cohen said, “If Sergeant Hadid gets in another car, starts it up and drives away, then Lieutenant Brosnan on surveillance follow him.”
In the years after the World Trade Center attacks, Muslim officers found themselves promoted to prestigious units because of their linguistic and cultural knowledge. A 2005 article in the Wall Street Journal announced that the N.Y.P.D. was “reaching out to immigrants” who want to take “Islam back from terrorist groups.” But their newly elevated status could also make them look like interlopers. In a 2008 lawsuit, a Muslim Egyptian officer in the Intelligence Division’s Cyber Unit complained that his colleagues told him that Muslims had no place in law enforcement, and that they should be operating hot-dog carts instead. Mohsin Aftab, a Muslim officer from Pakistan who worked in the Demographics Unit in 2005, told me that after he expressed doubts about the purpose of eavesdropping on mundane conversations between Muslims he was transferred. “I asked simple questions, like ‘Why do we have to do this report?’ ” he said. “They sent me packing. My heart was broken.” He said, “I did not get support from fellow-Muslims, because everyone is so scared of losing their jobs.”
The N.Y.P.D.’s Internal Affairs Bureau, which at the time had a staff of seven hundred and fifty people and a two-million-dollar budget, seemed especially attentive to the activities of Muslim and Arabic-speaking officers. The bureau investigates officers who have fallen under suspicion, using surveillance and sting operations called Integrity Tests. Charles Campisi, who ran the Internal Affairs Bureau between 1996 and 2014, wrote in his memoir, “Blue on Blue,” published this year, that the “prospect of a terrorist infiltration of the NYPD ranks isn’t just some vague, half-formed nightmare on my part.” He asks, “How hard is it to imagine that there could be an NYPD cop out there who’s willing to cross to the other side? . . . Or a cop who could use the trust built up over the course of years to penetrate the NYPD’s world-class intelligence and counterterrorism apparatus?” Preventing this outcome, he writes, requires “constant, proactive Internal Affairs or counterintelligence monitoring,” as well as adherence to “the old admonition: If you see something, or hear something, or even just suspect something, then say something.”
One officer, who was teaching himself Arabic, was reported to the Internal Affairs Bureau after his supervisor saw him browsing luggage on an Arabic Web site. The bureau spent a year surveilling and investigating him, and staged an Integrity Test in which a man posed as an imam.
Mohamed Abdelal, an officer born in Egypt, came under suspicion in 2008, after he tried, on his day off, to visit a jailed Egyptian businessman, who had embezzled money from a friend of Abdelal’s. A sergeant at the jail alerted the Internal Affairs Bureau. “Everything going on in our country, unfortunately these are signs and things that we look out and prepare ourselves for,” the sergeant said at Abdelal’s administrative trial. “It’s not profiling, it’s nothing. It’s just putting one and one together equals two.”
For a year, Abdelal said, undercover I.A.B. agents monitored his home; investigated his family, his friends, and his father’s business, a travel agency, and consulted with Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Secret Service about his movements. (The N.Y.P.D. denies investigating his family.) He was also subjected to two Integrity Tests by an undercover officer with a fake Arabic name. Abdelal told me, “They were trying to do a gotcha—to show I was part of a sleeper cell or something. They dissected everything about my life.”
Once, when Abdelal was spending the day with a college friend, a dentist visiting from Ohio, he noticed that a man wearing a black T-shirt and carrying a small black duffelbag appeared to be following them. Abdelal and his friend entered different stores, to see if the man would do the same. After the man followed them in and out of a Baskin-Robbins and back into a cigar shop, Abdelal began video-recording him with his phone. “Is there a reason you’re following us?” he asked. The man stared straight ahead, chewing gum, and said nothing. “I just want to know,” Abdelal continued. “You got to keep up if you’re going to follow us.” Silent, the man kept chewing.
No new information emerged from I.A.B.’s probes. The department charged Abdelal with improperly identifying himself at the jail visit and failing to seek approval from his commanding officer. For this, along with a few other minor violations, he was terminated from the department. The deputy commissioner of trials, however, wrote that “none of these, even in combination, would ordinarily justify termination.”
Abdelal told me, “It’s very hard to lose your job at the N.Y.P.D. unless you have committed a crime,” adding, “Even cops who have done heinous things—they still got to keep their jobs.” (The officer who was responsible for Eric Garner’s death is still on the force.) Abdelal continues to be haunted by the idea that someone is watching him. “There’s always this feeling of ‘Who’s following me? Who’s recording me?’ ” he said. When he learned that Muslim civilians were being surveilled by the N.Y.P.D. at mosques and cafés, he wasn’t surprised. He said, “The department was doing the same thing on the outside as the inside.”
Hadid was transferred out of the Intelligence Division in May, 2009, after only a year. An audit of his e-mails and an investigation by the integrity-control officer had revealed a discrepancy between the number of debriefings that Hadid had reported and the number of reports filed in the Intelligence Division’s database system. He was accused of asking officers to falsify debriefings, a charge he denied. “The investigation reveals at a minimum that Sergeant Hadid has failed to supervise his subordinates,” David Cohen wrote in a memo. The F.B.I. was instructed to shut off Hadid’s security clearance.
He was put on the midnight patrol shift in the 115th Precinct, in northern Queens, which has a sizable Muslim population. He worried that residents there would recognize his face from the debriefings. The move from plainclothes to uniform felt like a demotion, but he still took pride in the work. In an evaluation performed in 2010, his supervisor wrote, “Sergeant Hadid consistently reflects a high level of integrity and professionalism. He carries out department policy in an exemplary manner.”
But Hadid felt as if something had shifted: he had lost the department’s trust. Hadid said that when he called in sick one day—for the first time in seven years—a lieutenant from his precinct paid a surprise visit to his house and asked to see his cough medication. Then he was subjected to an Integrity Test. An officer called him, pretending to be a journalist, and asked him about a local crime. Hadid passed the test: he directed the journalist to contact the public-information office.
In October, 2010, officers from the Paris Police Prefecture flew to Brooklyn for Kargu’s murder trial. Hadid invited the French detectives to his house for dinner. His mother, visiting from Algeria, made couscous for them.
Hadid had never testified in court before. The clerk instructed him to raise his hand and swear to tell the truth. He left his hand in the air until the clerk, smiling, told him that he could put it down. When Hadid is nervous, he has to play phrases in his mind twice, first in Arabic and then translated into English, a strategy that he resorted to during his cross-examination. Kargu’s defense attorney, William Martin, spoke rapidly, asking Hadid about seemingly unrelated subjects; at times, neither of them seemed to understand what the other was saying.
“Do you have a wife that’s black?” Martin asked.
“Yes, I do, very proudly,” Hadid said.
“Very probably?” Martin said, mishearing. “You’re not sure?”
“Very proudly, right.”
Martin questioned Hadid about Leïla Grison, asking why they had talked about the death penalty.
“About what?” Hadid asked.
“The death penalty.”
“To whom?”
At one point, Martin said, “You indicated that the last time you had communication with her—correct me if I’m wrong—was at or around the time she was in French custody, correct?”
“That is correct,” Hadid said. “Yes, sir, I said that.” Hadid had never said that, but he was so flustered that he said he was acting like a “donkey wearing blinkers.”
Martin then confronted Hadid with his e-mail to Grison, which ended with the sign-off Je vous embrasse et à plus. The phrase translates as “I kiss all of you and see you later.” According to Joanna Dezio, who designed the test used to evaluate the proficiency of French court interpreters in the U.S., the phrase is equivalent to saying, in English, “Best to all of you, later.”
Martin began referring to Hadid as Hot Lips Hadid, and implied that Hadid was trying to steal Grison from her husband. “Your lips get hot, and you start thinking about that which you should not think about,” he said. “If you’ve got the hots for the man’s wife, do you think there’s a motive for him to lie, for him to add certain facts, for him to eliminate certain facts?” Martin later acknowledged that he had no evidence of an affair, but, like any seasoned defense attorney, he worked with what he had to damage the credibility of the prosecution’s witnesses. (When Grison was told she’d been accused of having an affair with Hadid, she said, “Wrong! Never!”)
Hadid’s mother and wife were cooking in the kitchen when Hadid got home that evening. “He stomped into the house,” Jean-Baptiste said. “He was about to explode. When we heard what happened in court, we said, ‘Oh, please. How can they even think something like that?’ ”
Kargu was convicted of manslaughter. Soon afterward, the N.Y.P.D.’s Internal Affairs Bureau began an investigation of Hadid that hinged on Martin’s suggestion of an affair. The department contacted the Homeland Security Inspector General’s office and obtained all of Hadid’s travel records since 1998. “There have been travels to Mexico, Morocco, Canada,” Jason Siragusa, a sergeant in Internal Affairs, wrote. Siragusa interviewed the two other detectives who had worked on the Kargu case in Paris, and they reported that they never saw Hadid speak to Grison alone. The bureau sent subpoenas to Microsoft and to Hotmail for Hadid’s e-mail records, and Siragusa obtained logs of all the calls to and from Hadid, his wife, and their oldest son. Siragusa estimated that he spent roughly a hundred hours trying to determine whether Hadid and Grison had had a relationship. Beyond the one e-mail exchange, he concluded, “I would have to say that I do not have any evidence of that.” Charles Campisi, the chief of the bureau, told me, “We couldn’t prove a personal relationship, but we knew there was something personal going on. Can’t really prove that.”
On April 8, 2011, just before midnight, Hadid arrived at the 115th Precinct and signed in at the front desk. As he wrote “PFD”—present for duty—he became aware of two lieutenants in plainclothes standing on either side of him. They asked him if he was carrying a gun. “No, no—I have kids,” Hadid said. They escorted him upstairs to his locker, removed his service weapon, emptied the magazines, and counted the bullets. Then they told him that he was being stripped of his gun, badge, and uniform.
The lieutenants would not disclose the reason. That night, Hadid and his wife lay in bed trying to figure out what he’d done wrong. Hadid had once borrowed a colleague’s service car and parked it near his house; during the night, it had been hit by another car. He was responsible for damaging department property. “I told him that can be the only thing,” Jean-Baptiste said.
Four days later, he learned that he’d been indicted for perjury. Perjury indictments typically include the statements that led to the charge, but Hadid’s police-union lawyer, Andrew Quinn, said, “That didn’t happen in this case, for reasons I do not understand.” Hadid was given no information about when or how he had lied.
He was reassigned to the VIPER (Video Interactive Patrol Enhanced Response) unit in the Van Dyke housing project, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. VIPER is the N.Y.P.D.’s netherworld, a holding cell for those who have fallen into disfavor. Hadid’s new colleagues included officers who were being investigated because they’d been accused of domestic violence, taking bribes, or injuring suspects. He said that officers laughed when he explained why he’d been sent to VIPER. “A relationship in Paris?” one cop told him. “That’s going to be all cleared out.”
Hadid and twenty other officers sat in a room with some thirty closed-circuit-television systems trained on courtyards, elevators, lobbies, and playgrounds in the housing complex. If they observed residents doing anything that might be suspicious, Hadid said, they zoomed in on the image. They were not permitted to go outside and interact with the public, so when they thought an arrest was warranted they called a local precinct. Once, on his break, Hadid heard other cops laughing about how another officer had zoomed in on a couple having sex on a rooftop. Hadid didn’t understand why the N.Y.P.D. “trusted crooked cops watching cameras.”
Hadid said that as he waited for his trial he kept getting disciplined for minor violations, such as allowing an officer to sign in two minutes late without notifying his superiors. For the first time in his career, he was told that he couldn’t take a day off for the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr until he submitted a signed letter from the mosque in his neighborhood. (Abdelal, the Egyptian-American officer who was fired in 2013, said that when he asked for a day off for Eid al-Fitr, whose date depends on the lunar calendar, his supervisor said, “What are you, a bunch of werewolves?”)
Kargu’s defense attorney, Martin, told me that he was shocked to learn that Hadid had been indicted for perjury. He has been a lawyer for more than thirty years, and he said that there had been instances when he brought prosecutors evidence that certain cops were lying. “The D.A.’s office couldn’t care less,” he said. “Quite frankly, cops know they will get a free pass. Why are they prosecuting Hadid when he’s done nothing different than what they all do?” He added, “He is now being subjected to what his Muslim brothers are subjected to.”
Three days before his trial, in October, 2012, Hadid learned that his indictment concerned eight words from Kargu’s trial—his reply (“That is correct. Yes, sir, I said that”) to Martin’s question about his last exchange with Grison—and five words from a pretrial hearing: he had indicated that he had not translated for the Brooklyn detectives who were interviewing Grison, a nonsensical statement, since he had already made it clear that he had.
Hadid waived a jury trial. The judge told him, “Obviously, at the heart of this is what your relationship was with Ms. Grison and whether you concealed that relationship.” A perjury conviction requires false testimony that is deliberate.
Melissa Carvajal, the Assistant District Attorney who had prosecuted Kargu, took the witness stand. She testified that Hadid had “flown to France twice” and that he and Grison had “a romantic relationship.” Her knowledge, she said, was based on a conversation she overheard between Kargu and Martin during a recess at trial. She said that at the trial she’d also seen papers on Martin’s table, which she assumed were additional e-mails between Hadid and Grison.
“I saw a lot of paperwork,” she said.
“And you never read any other e-mails, correct?” Quinn, Hadid’s lawyer, asked.
“Right, but they were in French. So I don’t speak.”
“Could you even see that they were e-mails, or was it just a folder with paperwork?”
“It was notes, right,” she said. “I could not say what they were.”
He went on, “And you were told that my client flew twice to France to meet with Ms. Grison?”
“Yes.”
“Has anyone in the Brooklyn D.A.’s office or the New York City Police Department done any investigation to determine whether or not there is any truth to that allegation?”
“No, I have no idea,” she said.
Martin said that he received a call from the District Attorney’s Office in the middle of the trial. “They were trying to find out if I had any extra information which would lead to something more,” he said. Martin said that he couldn’t help.
After Carvajal’s testimony, Hadid came to court with his U.S. and Algerian passports, which showed that he had not been to France since 2007, when he was working on the Kargu case. The Assistant District Attorney proposed that he had entered through a neighboring country.
In his closing statements, Hadid’s lawyer complained, “The foundation of this indictment—that my client had a romantic relationship with Leïla Grison—is built on an overheard conversation between a guy who is accused of murdering somebody,” he said. “It is outrageous that my client gets indicted based on that, with no effort, zero effort, to corroborate whether or not any of it is true.” The Internal Affairs Bureau had made extensive and unsuccessful efforts to corroborate the relationship, but the investigation was never disclosed.
The judge, Alan Marrus, accepted the prosecution’s claim that Hadid and Grison had exchanged several e-mails, and concluded that “the perjury in this case represented an intent to conceal a personal relationship.” He found Hadid guilty of one count of perjury in the first degree, a felony. The next day, the New York Post ran an article with the headline “Cop is Guilty of Amour.”
The Assistant District Attorney argued that Hadid should spend a year in prison. “He is still claiming innocence, which indicates that the defendant has no remorse,” she said. The judge sentenced him to five years of probation. He was dismissed from the N.Y.P.D.
Hadid tried to get a license for a food cart, so that he could sell hot dogs again, but, with a felony on his record, the city’s Department of Health wouldn’t grant one. His license to drive his cab was suspended for the same reason. Jean-Baptiste, a preschool teacher, had been laid off in 2010 and hadn’t found another job. Their monthly mortgage payments accumulated, until a collection agency placed a lien on their house. Hadid stopped sending money to his family in Algeria, but he was too ashamed to tell them why; he worried that his parents would think he’d become selfish. He looked for televisions on the sidewalk or in the garbage, fixed them, and tried to resell them. His family went on food stamps.
His closest friend from Algeria, who now lived in Queens, asked friends for donations for Hadid but kept his pitch vague, because he assumed that people in the neighborhood would feel less generous if they learned that Hadid had worked for the N.Y.P.D. (The friend asked me not to use his name, because he was afraid that if he was publicly associated with Hadid his name would somehow be flagged by law enforcement.) The friend said that his community had little sympathy for Muslim cops, ever since the Demographics Unit’s surveillance of Muslims had been exposed by the Associated Press, in 2011. The Demographics Unit shut down in 2014, and, a month later, an article in the Times, by Joseph Goldstein, disclosed the existence of the Citywide Debriefing Team, suggesting that the N.Y.P.D. still appeared to be profiling Muslims.
Hadid had by then become so convinced of the N.Y.P.D.’s omnipotence that he was under the mistaken impression that it had retaliated against the editor of the Times article by having her sent to a new post in Afghanistan, to silence her. He struck me as an optimistic and stable person, so I was surprised to learn that he thought the N.Y.P.D. controlled other industries. When his wife told him, “It’s just in your mind,” he no longer believed her. Like Abdelal, long after he’d been fired he was afraid that Internal Affairs officers were listening to his calls. Every time he spoke on the phone, he said, “I felt like I was talking to them.”
In late 2014, the appellate division of the New York State Supreme Court vacated Hadid’s conviction. “The prosecution failed to prove that Hadid intentionally made a statement he did not believe to be true,” the judges wrote in a unanimous decision. The court dismissed the underlying indictment, ruling that the evidence against Hadid was legally insufficient. “Hadid’s statement was a mistake,” the judges wrote.
Hadid requested that the police department reinstate him, but he received no response. He filed a lawsuit against the N.Y.P.D. and the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office, arguing that he had been the subject of a “malicious prosecution.” The city maintains that there was probable cause for Hadid’s indictment, and that his “conduct raised so many doubts about his judgment, reliability, trustworthiness, and personal integrity.” In a deposition last year, David Cohen said that Hadid lost his position in the Intelligence Division because of “performance issues that were severe enough to warrant his departure.” He also dismissed the idea that detectives in the Citywide Debriefing Team looked for Muslim- or Arabic-sounding names. “I don’t know what an Arabic-sounding name is,” he said. “Who knows what an Arabic-sounding name is?”
Hadid’s supervisor, Hector Berdicia, told me that Hadid was a “problem child,” and said that when Hadid worked at the Citywide Debriefing Team he had an affair with a Moroccan F.B.I. informant who was a waitress—an accusation that doesn’t appear in any of the internal-affairs records I reviewed. I met the woman in question. She had never been an informant; she worked at Europa Café, where Hadid and other officers in his unit sometimes went on their lunch break. She has a husband and three children and was offended that anyone would mistake her conversations with Hadid at the diner for something illicit. She had immigrated from Casablanca in 2003 and occasionally asked Hadid questions about schools in New York and the English language. “Let me tell you something, one of the things about us—I’m talking about Arabs—maybe we help each other in a different way,” she said. “Not everybody does that here in America.” She added, “I was so proud to see someone from my culture make it as a cop.”
Hadid’s lawsuit was dismissed last winter, primarily because prosecutors are entitled to absolute immunity. He is currently appealing, but proving a case of retaliation or discrimination is often doomed; rather than a smoking gun, there tends to be an accumulation of adverse events and subtle stereotypes that shape a career. In a workforce with so many guidelines for conduct, rules can be selectively enforced, and small violations can become a pretext for punishing other wrongs. I reviewed all the disciplinary orders in the N.Y.P.D. between January, 2012, and April, 2016, and found disparate punishments for the same violation. Hadid’s main offense—associating with someone who engaged in criminal activity—resulted in the termination of only eight per cent of guilty officers; for the majority, the punishment was lost vacation days; for a few, the punishment was an “instruction.”
In the past three years, four federal discrimination lawsuits have been brought against the N.Y.P.D. by Muslim officers. Last winter, a Muslim officer sued the city after fellow-officers allegedly tried to rip off her hijab and referred to her as a “terrorist” who might “detonate on patrol.”
Luna Droubi, a lawyer who filed a class-action complaint last year on behalf of officers who have beards for religious reasons and have been penalized for growing them, told me that there was a “massive influx of Muslim officers who joined the N.Y.P.D. to help fight a branch of their religion that they disagreed with. But they’ve lost the energy to fight the battle, because they have to fight the battle of being Muslim on a day-to-day basis in their own work.”
Masood Syed, the officer who initiated the lawsuit, told me that he often gets “this disgusted look” from his supervisors and colleagues because he has a beard. They seem to be asking, “Why can’t you assimilate? Assimilate or quit,” he said. (He was dismayed recently when he saw a red “Make America Great Again” hat in a display case at a police-training facility in the Bronx.) A Muslim detective who has been on the force for more than ten years told me that when he talks to his wife on the phone in Arabic other officers look at him as if he were communicating in some sort of dangerous code. “I request that Muslim cops be treated like everybody else,” he said. “If we had any intention of being terrorists, we would never have joined the N.Y.P.D.”
The department’s new leadership has worked to repair its relationship with Muslims, and two lawsuits challenging the department’s surveillance of Muslims have led to court-mandated reforms: the department is prohibited from investigations motivated by race, religion, or national origin, and a civilian representative will now monitor the way that the department gathers counterterrorism intelligence. John Miller, the deputy commissioner for Intelligence and Counterterrorism, told me that previous administrations did a “very lousy job explaining themselves. There is a narrative that is attached that will not un-attach now.” He said he recognizes that “you can’t take a decade of mistrust and wipe that out on the idea that there’s a new sheriff in town and everything is going to be all right.” Putting away “the baggage we are carrying from the old narrative,” he said, is more difficult in an era in which stereotypes about Muslims are reënforced by the country’s President. He went on, “If there was a group that suffered from this more than the others, it would be that small but really important Muslim community within the N.Y.P.D.—the nearly one thousand Muslim officers who had to answer to their communities.”
Hadid has applied for nearly a thousand jobs, most of them with the city. Last winter, the Department of Corrections called back. Hadid was so nervous that on the day of the interview he woke up at 3:48 a.m. “Two questions were playing in my head all morning,” he told me on the way to the interview: “Were you ever arrested? Were you ever convicted?”
In his car, in the parking lot, he rehearsed his responses. “Unfortunately, yes, there were some circumstances,” he said in a robotically professional tone. “I was falsely accused of having an affair in Paris.” He paused. “When I say that, they are going to look at me like—” He scrunched his face. In his pocket, he had a folded letter from the clerk of the New York Supreme Court certifying that “the above action was dismissed and all pending criminal charges related to this action were also dismissed.” He held it as if it might disintegrate. “Do you think I should keep the letter in my pocket or in my briefcase?” he asked me. He also wondered if he could segue from the Paris story to a discussion of his “multicultural skills,” as he called them.
He emerged from the interview elated and breathless. He had detailed responses to every question, drawing on a decade of experience. But, as the days passed and there was no follow-up call, he felt foolish for having suggested to his children that he might get the job. It was his sixth interview with the city that had gone great, it seemed, followed by no response. He wondered if his name had somehow been flagged. “Maybe they are thinking, If he’s so qualified, why does he look so desperate?” he said.
Last winter, when it became clear that he would not soon get a job, Hadid began driving a cab again. He leaves his house at 4:30 a.m. and rents a taxi at a garage two blocks away. It costs a hundred and forty dollars to rent the car for a twelve-hour shift; he doesn’t start making money until the afternoon. He packs provisions in his backpack: a box of Honey Bunches of Oats, tea biscuits, Moroccan bubble gum, three Naproxen pills for back pain, and a bag of Clancy’s corn chips. He tries not to drink more than one bottle of water each day, so that he doesn’t have to waste time going to the bathroom.
He has become preternaturally attuned to the figure of a white woman between the ages of sixty and eighty stepping into the street and looking both ways. He usually spends at least three hours a day with an empty cab, often after delivering a passenger to the airport. He has little desire to play dominoes in the airport lounge with the other cabdrivers, most of whom are men who have recently come to America and express faith that with hard work their careers will rise, their lives will improve, and they will feel that they belong. He cleans his car or reads a book. He made better money when he drove a cab in the nineties, before the advent of Uber. But he still prefers to work than to stay at home. “Even if I only get a dollar, I still get to talk and listen to good people,” he said. He has learned how to greet passengers in Spanish, Haitian Creole, and Mandarin, in addition to Arabic, English, and French.
Conversations in his taxi almost always begin the same way: compliments about his English and then a question about how long he’s been driving a cab. Hadid explains that he began driving twenty years ago, stopped for fifteen years, and returned. Then he tries to “give them their silence,” he said. “I understand that—I respect that. I put them exactly where they want to go.”
But people sometimes press for details, and Hadid happily obliges. It doesn’t take much to get him going, as long as he feels that the passenger is old or disillusioned enough to understand. He tells the story of his career and its devolution. When the ride is over, he thanks the person for listening. “Maybe they think I’m cuckoo, or some bullshit garbage Muslim,” he said. “But, when I talk to them, at least I feel that they have a little understanding, a little feeling, of what happened to a Muslim cop.” ♦
An earlier version of this article suggested that David Cohen was the deputy director of the entire C.I.A.
