Obstruction of Justice Read online

  The timing of the life insurance move, coming during a critical moment of a high-profile criminal case, illustrated that Abid had motive to defraud. And the long history of deception by Abid that could be readily demonstrated with public government records—from tax fraud to bankruptcy fraud to lying on his House ethics disclosures—showed a past pattern of behavior that even I, as a non-lawyer, knew could be helpful to Hadeed as far as his task at hand, which was showing whether Abid had swindled his stepmother out of $50,000.

  Gilani gave me Hadeed’s contact information and asked me to brief him, so I did. But he seemed disinterested. Of all the possible reactions to what I was telling him—involving congressional servers, suitcases of cash, and FBI investigations—I could understand excitement or disbelief, but not disinterest. I had to find some way to make him understand how these two cases related, and how a rigorous discovery served both our interests. A few days before the court date, I happened to watch an Amazon TV series Goliath, in which a disgraced alcoholic lawyer played by Billy Bob Thornton salvages his reputation by pulling the thread of misconduct in a $50,000 case until it blossomed into an award of half a billion dollars. Gilani was a meek, broken woman, and the person she was counting on to advocate for her, Hadeed, was a meek, broken man. But he was also someone I imagined was searching for redemption and triumph. He had to be convinced that this case could resurrect his career and put his name back in the headlines—for a positive reason this time. Given the amount of money Gilani was indicating she might be entitled to in Pakistan, there could even be big money for Hadeed if he played his cards right. I thought a rousing, in-person speech could do it. On the escalator ride up to the floor that housed the civil courtrooms for the initial hearing, I mouthed the motivational speech to myself. But when I actually gave it, its effect was deflated by Hadeed repeatedly dropping his papers on the ground and bending down to gather them up while saying, “Oh, geeze.” I couldn’t understand how the balding man with chest hairs sticking out through a rumpled shirt didn’t seem to find a thrill in the twists and turns of chasing down new leads and pursuing justice wherever it took us.

  Technically, the lawsuit was only between Abid and Gilani, but the entire family, except Hina, who had already fled the country, showed up to present a unified front. When I walked by Abid outside the courthouse, he smirked and told me I wasn’t “authorized” to take his picture. Just before the parties were summoned into the courtroom, Abid offered to settle the case with Gilani by splitting the money. But Gilani wouldn’t settle. She later told me, “I didn’t do the deal because they had been adopting bad behaviors. I cannot agree to that. It wasn’t about the money.”

  In the hearing—which was to address a motion for default filed by Abid’s lawyer within minutes of Gilani missing the deadline—Abid’s lawyer told the judge he was poor and needed the $50,000 to pay the bills, omitting the fact that the immediate family had long cleared the better part of a million dollars a year. The judge admonished that whatever the law might say about deadlines, he found it unusual that Abid filed an insurance claim the day after the death and then used the widow’s period of mourning against her. Most people are too busy grieving to think about money for a while after the death of someone they love.

  The judge denied Abid’s motion for summary judgment and gave Hadeed more time to prepare. The life insurance dispute would live to see another day, and with it, the fate of vast sums of Pakistani wealth, for which no power of attorney had been assigned.

  Hadeed was a striking example of a phenomenon I’d encounter again and again. One in which, even when people saw what was happening, they stood by passively. “Good luck with your stories,” he told me, as if this was my bizarre, frightening series of events. But I didn’t ask for this. I just did what I assumed anyone would if they’d peeped through this astonishing porthole. In the end, I came to see that most people are reluctant to believe their lives could harbor the vividness and stakes of a Hollywood drama right there in front of them. It’s a strange tendency, the urge to believe the interesting stuff only happens to someone else, to bigshots and celebrities, or behind TV screens. That an ordinary person like you or me could never and should never get caught up in something wild and major. But I’m here to tell you that the thing about ordinary people is there’s a lot of us, and when those wild things occur—and they do— statistically speaking, we’re exactly the people who’d get caught up.

  Faced with the moment when you risk just a little to make a big difference, most people recoil. They all hope the next guy will do it. And Hadeed was unlikely to become our Billy Bob Thornton lead. When I told him I suspected that his client, who was literally homeless, actually had millions of dollars in assets that she could obtain with the right legal assistance, he looked at me like I was crazy. A few months and a 15,000-mile round trip to Pakistan later, when I tried to tell him I’d obtained the documents proving that Gilani was entitled to a portion of two massive real estate developments, he didn’t return my call.

  ELEVEN

  “ROB YOU WITH THEIR TONGUES”

  Who was this exceptionally manipulative person named Imran Awan and how did he come to command such influence over so many people? For that matter, how does an entire set of brothers manage to turn out this way? The answer seemed to lie in the father, Muhammad.

  In the U.S., Muhammad collected a disability check, and on insurance records, he said he made only $1,200 a year working as a religious adviser. Yet 7,000 miles away, he somehow controlled assets sufficient to unleash a cutthroat game of cat and mouse among a sordid cast of Pakistanis. Incorporation records showed five different LLCs running out of Muhammad’s modest home in Springfield, Virginia, including “Vienna Real Estate Corp.,” a financial lender named “Express Services Corp.,” and a nonprofit, the “International Sufi Educational Organization.” Many of these LLCs mentioned the name Sampson T. Winfield.

  Winfield was a real estate assessor who had been blacklisted for inflating home values. Public records suggested he had multiple wives in Ohio, went by multiple names, and had conducted mortgage fraud. Now he lived an hour outside of D.C. in Bristow, Virginia. Despite the obviously suspicious businesses that linked the elder Awan and Winfield, the FBI never bothered to talk to him. I did. Like so many of the people who’d dealt with them, Winfield had come away with the notion that even in a world of thieves, the Awans had no honor.

  Winfield told me that he had discussed several business ideas with Muhammad Awan, but when he realized the Awans “were not good people,” he stopped.

  “The father is a crook, every time I help him, he was not a good man,” Winfield said.

  Muhammad told him he had made a fortune in admittedly stolen Pakistani real estate, which he was willing to invest in Winfield’s businesses, Winfield said. “He was a big fraud. They took a lot of people’s land. I told him on judgment day you’re going to be in trouble.”

  He summed up the Awans’ modus operandi: “They rob you with their tongues.”

  * * *

  Even as a teenager in Faisalabad, Pakistan, Imran pulled the strings in the family.

  In 1997, Imran Awan applied to immigrate to the United States under the diversity lottery. He won. The family—Muhammad, Imran, Abid, Jamal, sister Adeela, and their mom, Tahira—borrowed money for the plane tickets to the United States, and when they arrived, stayed with distant relatives: Nasim Akhtar, who owed the federal government six figures in outstanding taxes, and her husband, who was indicted on charges of Medicaid fraud. Akhtar told me the Awans were not exactly grateful, and “the relationship was ruined over money.” The Awans ripped them off, something that surprised her since “there was an expectation of trust given the relationship.”

  The Awans acquired a garden apartment of their own in the same development on Manitoba Drive in Alexandria, Virginia, a complex full of Pakistani nationals. For whatever else might be said about Imran, no one has ever called him lazy. His pursuit of money—in the early days simply to support the
family—knew no bounds. He’d run home from high school, toss his backpack inside, and work at the McDonald’s across the street until midnight.

  His father was more interested in manipulating the system than in working. He took a series of jobs, but only as an excuse to get disability payments.

  “He doesn’t like to work. He was working for a while for me at KFC and he told me his knee was broken, so I said, ‘Don’t pick up anything heavy.’ Then he said, ‘My knee got hurt at work, do you have insurance?’ I said, ‘You lied to me; you told me you hurt it back home playing football,’ ” Winfield told me. “He got a job in Washington, D.C. and sued the company for hurting the same knee; then he got disability from it. It was a maintenance company. He retired from there and said he hurt his knee shoveling snow.”

  I was starting to see that, at best, Gilani had a blind spot when it came to her husband. I’d discovered in court documents that he’d changed his name from Muhammad Awan to Haji Shah, and when I asked her why, she told me it was because Imran had stolen his disability money and he wanted to distance himself from his criminal sons. But that wasn’t the full truth. To Pakistanis, the last name Shah indicates one is a descendant of the holy prophet of Islam. Haji has similar spiritual connotations. To Pakistanis I spoke with, falsely fashioning himself as a member of that caste amounted to fraud, and he used it to represent himself as a faith healer selling snake oil to the uneducated masses of Manitoba Drive. “He became a fraud priest. He puts in newspaper: ‘I can make you heal if you give me money,’ ” Winfield said. “He takes money from people with his talking.”

  Imran, the eldest child, was trained as Muhammad’s apprentice. Lithe, handsome, and charismatic, Imran was a good talker, especially with women. Muhammad would find men who were suffering from cancer and other deadly ailments and send Imran to convince their wives to exchange their life savings—sometimes as much as $20,000—for the continued life of their spouses. The pair learned as much as possible about their targets, and Imran would talk his way in with flattery. “So many naive people, they got entrapped. He was making a lot of money,” Winfield said. Relying on Muhammad’s spells in lieu of medical procedures, the clients often died.

  Within a few years, and after working his way through community college and even Johns Hopkins University at a frantic pace, Imran used that charm to talk his way into an arena where the stakes were much higher: Congress. In his early twenties and while still not a U.S. citizen, he began working in congressional IT through a contractor, InterAmerica Corp., now iConstituent, which managed data about people who requested help from their Congress members; data that could include Social Security numbers and other sensitive information. One of the people he worked for through the contractor was Florida Representative Robert Wexler, who in 2004 hired Imran directly. An InterAmerica executive told me that Imran had signed a non-compete agreement to prevent Imran from cutting out the middleman, but Congressman Wexler warned the company not to try to enforce it.

  Imran became a citizen sometime that same year and his client list soon expanded to include Representatives Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida and Representative Xavier Becerra of California.

  His early employers encouraged newly elected members to place him on their payrolls and was soon making the maximum salary allowed under House rules. That’s when his relatives began appearing on the House payroll. As soon as more dollars could no longer be attributed to that person under the House rules, another relative appeared, then another. You could see it in the salary records: the Awans spread like a virus, capturing key influencers, then percolating out through their ranks. The Awans' employers include four of the last five chairs of the House Democratic Caucus, four of the last five chairs of the Congressional Black Caucus, and the two most recent chairs of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Immediately after Imran gained citizenship, he married his first cousin, Hina Alvi, automatically conveying citizenship onto her. She joined the House payroll as well.

  He’d always had his eye on another Pakistani woman, Sumaira, but she was married. Sumaira’s husband was murdered, and Imran wed her in Pakistan, taking her as a second wife under Sharia law.

  Imran and Hina moved to a single-family home in the suburbs but kept Sumaira in an apartment on Manitoba Road. According to a police report, he also kept a third woman a few doors down in the same complex, and after that woman called the police on him, the officers found her bloodied. Imran sometimes spent the night with Hina, sometimes with Sumaira, and occasionally with other women, including Sumaira’s cousin.

  Even while working for Congress, the brothers spent significant time in Pakistan. In 2007, their mother died in a car accident there. The youngest Awan, Jamal, was thirteen years old, and he fell under Imran’s wing, eagerly doing whatever his older brother asked. Though Jamal still had a father, Imran legally adopted his youngest brother and used the paperwork to put him on congressional health insurance as a dependent. Jamal was Imran’s eager gofer—his duties included ferrying papers between Imran and the Pakistani embassy—while balancing a normal life enrolled at George Mason University. When Jamal was twenty, he joined the House payroll at $160,000 a year.

  There was also an Awan sister, Adeela, who wed Naeem Shah, her next-door neighbor in Springfield, Virginia, in an arranged marriage. Naeem didn’t trust the brothers, and they apparently didn’t trust Adeela. They refused to arrange for congressmen to place her on their staffs. Instead, like many of the Awans’ associates from the Manitoba Road apartments, she found employment in government, in her case, administering car and real estate taxes for Fairfax County.

  After growing up in Faisalabad with fourteen people crammed into a three-bedroom house, and his grandfather commuting to farmers’ fields on horse-drawn cart, no amount of money seemed to be enough for Imran. He amassed a stunning amount of wealth, controlling the family’s assets as one pool of money while maintaining a superhuman ability not to spend a dime. He told Sumaira that—though I assume it was a wildly inflated boast—the assets he had squirreled away in Pakistan were worth $77 million, eleven times what the family was paid by Congress. Either way, from the outside, no one would guess the income he had coming in.

  The middle brother, Abid, lacked those superhuman abilities. Imran needed him to serve as a lieutenant, but he was always the weakest link. Abid had only a high school degree when he was placed on the House payroll at $165,000 a year, while simultaneously running the CIA car dealership. The cocky Abid was a schemer like Imran, but wasn’t as good at it. Most of the evidence of wrongdoing that authorities discovered on Capitol Hill involved him, and like any normal person, he felt that the purpose of having lots of money was to enjoy it. While Imran drove around in a rusted-out sedan that a fellow IT aide described as an “oxidized piece of shit,” Abid had a black BMW M3, lowered like a rapper’s. It must have cost $100,000.

  Ajmad Khan, a business partner at the car dealership, told reporters from the Daily Mail that when Abid went into D.C., he “would spend $3,000 or $4,000 a night” at nightclubs. “Abid would say, 'I work for the government, I don’t care. I have a $120,000 job and my wife is working, my brother’s working, this one’s working, that one’s working.'”1 Abid couldn’t restrain himself from unorthodox transactions, with money flying in every direction. He loaned $30,000 to a Hispanic man on the terms that it be repaid a few days later, then sued him when he failed to pay. When Abid declared bankruptcy to discharge one million dollars in debts, his documents revealed that his creditors ranged from a possible stripper to a wealthy student from the United Arab Emirates.

  The most out-of-place appearance was the Abid’s wife Nataliia Sova, a bombshell blonde from the Ukraine who seemed to have no public-record footprint in the U.S. whatsoever until she married him.

  * * *

  Between Imran’s real estate broker job, Abid’s purported car dealership, Jamal’s college, and Rao Abbas’ burger flipping, it’s hard to imagine that the members of the Awan clique were actually earning their $160
,000 salaries as IT experts on Capitol Hill. No one was pretending people like Sova had any IT qualifications. “Whether they had formal training or not, they were trained on the job by Imran,” Imran’s lawyers said.

  A car dealership associate said Abid “would just go in [to Capitol Hill] a couple times a week for a couple of hours, just to show his face. On paper I think [Abid and Imran] were both working, but in reality, only one was working.” When Gilani's cousin Syed asked Abid what he did for work, Abid said he’d have to ask Imran. When Abid did show up on the Hill, he told people he someday hoped to work for himself rather than his brother—an acknowledgement that even though on paper he was hired and employed directly by congressmen, the House paychecks were all being aggregated by Imran, who then dished out a cut to his proxies.

  For a time, Haseeb Rana, a man of Indian heritage whom Imran knew from high school and had bona fide IT qualifications, was “hired” by Imran and forced to do the work of several high-paid aides for a fraction of the salary. His father told me that at first he was proud of his son for getting in with Imran because Imran’s home was full of portraits of prominent politicians, and he projected success. But Rana quit angrily after only a few months, unwilling to be taken advantage of.

  There are no timecards to punch in the House and no way of proving who was actually working, short of having members of Congress testify that they’d been signing paychecks month after month to people they never saw. Members were unwilling to do this. Rana would have made a key witness in a prosecution into taxpayer dollars going to no-show workers, but investigators didn’t even appear to know about him because their review didn’t go back in time. By the time investigators got around to approaching him, if they ever bothered at all, Imran had hooked Rana up with his lawyer, Chris Gowen, bringing their interests into alignment and ensuring Rana wouldn’t talk. Gowen wouldn’t say who paid Rana’s legal bill.