Guyanese Russell Defreitas was yesterday sentenced to life imprisonment in a New York Court by Judge Dora Irizarry, who before sentencing him said he was proven to be dangerous by his own words.
An Associated Press (AP) report quoted Assistant US Attorney Marshall Miller as saying in the Brooklyn Federal Court yesterday that the plot was the idea of Defreitas, an American citizen, and “he explained that he’d been thinking about for years.”
According to the report, the defence had sought a 15-year term for Defreitas, arguing in court papers that he and his cohorts were harmless trash talkers who were “egged on” by the informant. The papers’ portrayed the defendant as broken-down, illiterate and delusional.
His “stories about how they would accomplish the plot became more and more ridiculous until they finally rose to the level of the absurd, with Mr Defreitas’ scheme to send ‘ninjas’ in to attack the airport,” the defence said.
The plots were “clearly not operational,” defence attorney Mildred Whalen said on Thursday. Defreitas, she added, “was a boastful man and talked a good game, but when push came to shove, he wasn’t the person doing this.”
Judge Irizarry disagreed, while saying Defreitas’ own words proved he was dangerous.
She cited a recording of him predicting, “The whole of Kennedy will go up in smoke. The bottom line is this was his baby. This was his plan.” The defendant appeared determined to carry out the attack “whether the government was involved or not,” she added before imposing the life term.
Defreitas, 67, was once employed as a cargo handler at the JFK airport. He and former PNCR parliamentarian Abdul Kadir—who was sentenced to life imprisonment late last year—were found guilty of the terror plot last August, after the jury deliberated for five days. They were charged along with two other men, Guyanese Abdel Nur and Trinidadian Kareem Ibrahim. Nur was last month sentenced to 15 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to lending support to the plot while Ibrahim is yet to go on trial because of ill health. The plot to blow up the airport was hatched in January 2006, and reportedly involved blowing up jet fuel tanks leading to the airport.
According to the US prosecutors, Defreitas, who was listed as the mastermind of the plot, initially told investigators that he was not involved in the plan other than having his brain picked for information and that individuals who approached him at mosques in Guyana and the US were just using his knowledge of the airport.
He said they knew he had been an employee at the airport because of an incident he was involved in several years ago when the authorities found drugs in his suitcase.
But investigators informed the accused that they knew about his surveillance of the airport and told him that they had been watching him each of the four times he and the US government informant went to the airport to conduct surveillance.
“Defreitas sat silent with his head down for several minutes,” after he was informed of the damning evidence, a report of the court proceedings said.
After a break he changed his story and said he was involved with the plan and that they had come up with a code word for the plan—‘Shining Light’—in reference to the JFK airport.
The report said that after being shown a photograph of Kadir and others, Defreitas said he had met the former parliamentarian at a mosque in Guyana, but had never shown him the surveillance video of JFK nor discussed the plot with him.
He claimed that when he and the informant went to Linden they met Kadir’s son and not the parliamentarian.
And while he also said he did not show anyone the surveillance video, he was confronted with an audio recording taken during a trip to Trinidad on which he was heard instructing the informant to play the video and then he narrated it for Kareem Ibrahim.
He was asked again if he had showed the video to anyone in Trinidad and in Guyana and replied that he thought he should have a lawyer present for any further questions.
He said he understood his Miranda rights which were read to him at the beginning of the interview and when asked why he thought he needed a lawyer at that time when he did not ask for one at the beginning of the interview, he replied: “I did not realise you had so much evidence.” The interview was then terminated. As he was being led out of the interview room, he told the investigators, “You guys are the best.”
The trial also had some zany moments which appeared to make Defreitas into a figure of ridicule.
According to a New York newspaper report, Defreitas had a secret weapon in mind—rats. According to the report, Defreitas thought that letting the rodents loose at the airport could help to create a diversion. He was heard discussing the plan on a recording with a government informant. The report said Defreitas brainstormed about the rat invasion while talking with the undercover government informant about how to detonate fuel tanks and lines at JFK. “You can’t expect people to drive a car and then park the car on the runway,” Defreitas said in a 2007 tape recording made by the informant. “We got to come up with supernatural things. Maybe get some rats.”
When asked to explain what they were talking about, the informant said:
“By him sending rats to frighten people, he thought it would distract security… create chaos.” The defence brought up some other Defreitas theories, hoping to portray him as a harmless crackpot—his belief that there was a building at JFK where faeces are converted to fuel, a scheme to sell water purified by prayer and his claim that the airport control tower could detect an ant on the ground.
