Fear America (Season 17, Episode 4)
Premise: A Muslim American lawyer’s videotaped killing is dressed up as an anti-Muslim hate crime, but he turns out to have been a would-be informant against a terror cell that included his wife’s cousin.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 17, Episode 4
- Detectives
- Det. Ed Green (Jesse L. Martin), Det. Nina Cassady (Milena Govich)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), ADA Connie Rubirosa (Alana de la Garza), DA Arthur Branch (Fred Dalton Thompson)
- Guest stars
- Richard Brooks as defense attorney Paul Robinette, Bernardo Peña as Ben Faoud, Navid Negahban as Imam Ibrahim, Marjan Neshat as Diane Khalaby, Michael Genet as Warren Shenkler
- Director
- Constantine Makris
- Writers
- Sonny Postiglione & Robert Nathan
Summary
The Investigation
“Fear America” opens with a hate-crime video: masked men under a “United Americans for One America” banner denounce Muslims and kill Eric Khalaby, a 26-year-old lawyer from Bay Ridge, in an old fleet garage, then send the tape to news outlets. Working with the Joint Terrorism Task Force and the FBI, Green and Cassady learn the group has been dormant since the 1990s and that a late call Khalaby’s wife, Diane, says came from his law firm never happened.
A colleague recalls Khalaby arguing with Diane’s cousin Ben Faoud, who claims he was confronting Khalaby about an affair. A search of the Khalaby home turns up a prepaid phone and extremist literature, sparking a quarrel between Green and Cassady over profiling, but a 911 tape shows Khalaby tried to warn police of an attack within 36 hours. He called from Araway Security, which installs cameras for the Port Authority and which he had secretly visited with Faoud posing as an associate.
Voice analysis links Faoud to the killing tape, and his apartment yields a passport stamped in Afghanistan, Syria and Pakistan, hidden SIM cards and Stinger missile schematics. A thermal scan finds him hiding in a Maspeth mosque, where he is arrested and another man, Ray Al-Sini, is shot dead. Photos of Pier 12 on Faoud’s laptop lead the FBI to reveal that two pounds of uranium arrived by ship from London, swapped for a dummy by British intelligence. Federal officials let the state try Faoud for murder but forbid any mention of the uranium.
The Trial
Former ADA Paul Robinette defends Faoud and calls the case persecution of Muslims. Citing the Supreme Court’s Kyllo ruling on heat sensors, the judge suppresses DVDs of the killing found in the mosque but lets the arrest stand. When the uranium story leaks to the press, federal official Warren Shenkler blames Branch’s office. Diane tells prosecutors she warned Faoud that her husband was going to the police and that Faoud was not at the mosque that night, but she will not testify against her imam, who backs his alibi.
Faoud testifies that the government framed him. Prosecutors trace the leak to Imam Ibrahim, who knew the reporter, and McCoy threatens to charge him as a co-conspirator unless he tells the truth. Called by the defense, the imam withdraws the alibi and recounts hearing Faoud tell Khalaby that the smuggled uranium would leave Times Square and Wall Street uninhabitable for 50 years.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury convicts Faoud of first-degree murder. Afterward the imam, branded a traitor in the courtroom, tells McCoy he has been targeted at home and says that, asked to choose between being Muslim and American, he has turned out to be neither.
Why it stands out
- Richard Brooks guest stars as Paul Robinette, the former ADA, now defending a terror suspect against McCoy.
- The suppression fight turns on the Supreme Court’s Kyllo decision on heat-sensing searches, written by Justice Scalia, applied here to a mosque.
- McCoy has to win the murder case without mentioning the uranium plot that supplies the motive, after federal officials warn that disclosing it would break the National Security Act of 1947.