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After Officer’s Killing, a Focus on a North Carolina Warrant

2011-12-13T20:35:00.000-08:00

Community members, residents and officials joined a candlelight vigil for Officer Peter J. Figoski that was organized by the 75th Precinct community council in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Tuesday.

Despite his being wanted for a shooting in North Carolina, the man accused of killing a police officer in Brooklyn on Monday was twice released from jail in New York this fall because the authorities in North Carolina declined to have him extradited, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said on Tuesday.The New York police had arrested the man, Lamont Pride, twice since September, first for possession of a knife and a second time for possession of crack cocaine and for endangering the welfare of a child.

Each time, Mr. Kelly said, the police noticed that Mr. Pride was wanted for the shooting in North Carolina, but that the arrest warrant could be served only in that state. A New York police officer called the authorities in Greensboro, N.C., after the second arrest, in November, Mr. Kelly said, because of “a concern about a violent felon going back on the streets of New York City,” though a spokeswoman for the Greensboro police disputed Mr. Kelly’s chronology.

In any case, by the time the Greensboro police requested extradition, Mr. Pride had already been freed, Mr. Kelly said. “He should not have been out on the streets,” Mr. Kelly said at a news conference. “He should ideally have been extradited to North Carolina. But that did not happen.”

Mr. Pride, 27, was ordered held without bail Tuesday on charges of first- and second-degree murder, aggravated murder of a police officer, and criminal possession of a weapon. “He made a choice to end the officer’s life,” a prosecutor, Kenneth M. Taub, said in a courtroom packed with about 100 standing police officers, officials and relatives of Officer Peter J. Figoski, who was killed on Monday.

The police said that they had also arrested Kevin Santos, 30, who they said was Mr. Pride’s accomplice in the break-in that led to Officer Figoski’s death, and three other men called accomplices: Ariel Tejada, 22, Nelson Moralez, 27, and Michael Velez, 21. All four face charges of second-degree murder, and each also faces weapons charges, with the exception of Mr. Moralez, according to the police.

Mr. Tejada and Mr. Moralez were found near the scene and were initially “treated as witnesses,” but when their stories began to unravel they were placed under arrest, the police said. Mr. Velez, the authorities said, was supposed to act as a getaway driver.

All four were ordered held without bail, and as they were led out of the courtroom to jail, the crowd of officers erupted in cheers.

Police officers responded to a call of a robbery in progress early Monday, and the first officers who arrived at the basement apartment in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn, found a tenant bloodied from a beating, the police said. They had no idea that the robbers were still there, hiding in a dark room behind them. When the robbers tried to slip out, they were met by two more police officers. Mr. Pride raised a pistol and fired, striking Officer Figoski, a 22-year veteran, in the face, the police said. Officer Figoski died five hours later, at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center.

Mr. Pride, who was quickly arrested by Officer Figoski’s partner, has a lengthy arrest record in North Carolina dating back to 2007, when he was arrested for drug possession, according to the authorities there. In 2009, he served prison time for robbery, and he later served jail sentences for assaulting a woman and for misdemeanor assault. Then, in August of this year, he was involved in the nonfatal shooting of a Greensboro man, the police there said.

Mr. Pride went to New York, his birthplace, and was arrested near Coney Island on Sept. 22, for public possession of a blade longer than four inches, a misdemeanor charge. Mr. Pride pleaded guilty to a violation and was released from jail the next day.

Mr. Kelly said that the police had run a background check and found the North Carolina warrant, but that the warrant could be executed only inside North Carolina.Mr. Pride was arrested again on Nov. 3, in an apartment near Coney Island where the police executed a search warrant. Two children, 11 and 16, were in the home. Prosecutors later described the condition in the apartment as “deplorable, with cockroaches, filth everywhere.”The police said they found six bags of crack cocaine on a desk and four bags of marijuana on another defendant; they arrested Mr. Pride and two others. Mr. Pride did not live there, but the arrest happened inside the building where he had been arrested for carrying a knife earlier in the fall.

Mr. Kelly said that after the November arrest, the police again checked on the outstanding warrant against Mr. Pride and found that it could be executed only in North Carolina. Mr. Kelly said a police commander called the authorities in North Carolina after the November arrest. “I assume that what he tried to do is have it cleared up over the phone,” Mr. Kelly said.

Mr. Kelly speculated that the Greensboro police did not initially pursue extradition because of “resources.” It would have been up to the Greensboro authorities to pay for detectives to travel to New York and to transport Mr. Pride to North Carolina.

Susan Danielsen, a spokeswoman for the Greensboro Police Department, said in a statement Tuesday night that the district attorney there determines the type of warrant to issue. “In-state extradition is appropriate and reasonable when officials have no reason to believe that the suspect is a flight risk,” she said. “This was the case with Pride.” However, Howard Newman of the district attorney’s office in Guilford County, where Greensboro is located, said Tuesday that the police did not request extradition until Nov. 8.

Ms. Danielson disputed Mr. Kelly’s chronology as to when the police commander called the Greensboro police, saying that it was on Nov. 8 — four days after Mr. Pride had been freed. Paul J. Browne, the spokesman for the New York Police Department, said its records showed that “there was a contact made on Nov. 3,” the day before he was released.

According to a transcript of Mr. Pride’s Nov. 4 court hearing, Judge Evelyn Laporte of Brooklyn Criminal Court was told that there was an active warrant for his arrest in connection with a shooting in North Carolina. The prosecutor on the case, Evan Degrees, requested $2,500 bail.

“Anything recovered from Pride, Lamont?” she asked the prosecutor, referring to drugs.

“Nothing,” he responded. “There is no indication anything was recovered from him.”

She decided to release him without bail. He did not show up for his next court appearance, in November.

Mr. Browne, the New York police spokesman, said, “The person responsible for Officer Figoski’s death is the one who pulled the trigger, not the authorities in North Carolina.”

At his news conference, Mr. Kelly did not criticize the Brooklyn judge for the decision, but he did note the prosecutor’s $2,500 bail request, implying that it was relatively low.

Judge Laporte did not respond to a message seeking comment. A spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney did not respond to messages Tuesday, but earlier said that $2,500 was relatively high for the charge Mr. Pride was facing.

Premier’s Actions in Iraq Raise U.S. Concerns

2011-12-13T06:10:00.000-08:00

Jasim Nusaif, 71, in a photograph held by his son. He was among hundreds of former Baath Party members swept up in recent arrests. His family said the party expelled him in the 1980s.

BAGHDAD — Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has moved swiftly to consolidate power in advance of the American military withdrawal, offering a glimpse of how Iraq’s post-American identity may take shape, by rounding up hundreds of former Baath Party members and evicting Western companies from the heavily fortified Green Zone.As Mr. Maliki met with President Obama in Washington on Monday to discuss Iraq’s future after the end of a painful nearly nine-year war, his aggressive actions back home raised new concerns in the West, where officials have long been uneasy with the prime minister’s authoritarian tendencies.

The actions also underscored the many lingering questions about America’s uncertain ally, a prime minister who once found refuge in Syria and Iran and who will now help write the epitaph to the American invasion.

“There are two dominant narratives in Washington about Maliki,” said Ramzy Mardini, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington who recently published a report on the arrests. “Some say he is a nationalist; others say he is a puppet of Iran.”

Both are oversimplifications, he said: “Maliki is a Maliki-ist. His religion is the church of survivability.”

Mr. Maliki, whose bland public persona belies his mastery of Iraq’s zero-sum politics, will help decide if his nation preserves its fragile democracy or if it will return to one-man-one-party rule. As an exile from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq who escaped a death warrant, Mr. Maliki has proven his ability to retain power. But he is also criticized for holding tight to a security-first mentality. And as a Shiite leader who some say owes his current position to Iran’s backing, he has not made clear if Washington, or Tehran, will wield more influence.

A Western diplomat who has worked closely with Mr. Maliki said the prime minister’s mind-set still reflected the years after the American invasion when 3,000 Iraqi civilians were dying each month and sectarian war threatened to rip the country apart.

“He sees himself as fighting since 2006 to pull the country out of the brink,” the diplomat said.

But Mr. Maliki has also taken steps to put his stamp on the Green Zone, the physical center of government whose geography and very name became shorthand for the cloistered American presence. His son, Ahmed, has overseen raids evicting Western companies from the Green Zone in recent weeks. As the prime minister left for the United States, onerous new security procedures were put in place at the few entrances into the area.

That, and the scale and secrecy of the arrests in October and November, of 600 former Baathists, have raised new tensions in Iraq’s suspicious political atmosphere. They have fanned fears that Mr. Maliki will use the threat of terrorism and unrest as a pretext to strike political foes.

The Iraqi government said the arrests had been prompted by a tip from Libya’s transitional government that said documents revealed Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was working with insurgents to stage a coup. Mr. Maliki has denied any sectarian or political motives behind the sweep, pointing out that both Shiites and Sunnis were arrested. In an interview with Iraq’s official television channel, he said the raids had captured loyalists to Saddam Hussein who were conspiring with Al Qaeda, not peaceful, low-level party apparatchiks.

“We do not have space in our government for those plotting against our government,” he said.

A person briefed on the raid by Iraqi security forces said some of the detainees were in fact military and intelligence officials from the old government. Other names on the target lists, however, included laborers, political adversaries of the government, the elderly — even dead people.

“It’s highly unlikely to be much validity behind” the coup plot, said a Western official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, to avoid upsetting relations with the Iraqi government. “Baathism here is a symbol that Maliki uses as a bogyman. It gives them the leeway to go around arresting people. It’s about a climate of fear.”

Mr. Maliki’s signal achievement since he first won office in 2006 has been consolidating control of the security forces, reducing violence through a willingness to crack down on Shiite militias from strongholds in the southern city of Basra. The defeat of the militias demonstrated to Iraqis, particularly the Sunnis, that Mr. Maliki would evenly target all insurgent groups, regardless of sect, and bolstered his credentials as a nationalist.
As Iraq’s commander in chief, he sometimes micromanages the forces under his control. He pays informers out of his own pocket for intelligence and sometimes sends orders to commanders in the field by text message, officials say.But in a country where political leaders regularly fly off to second homes in Jordan or London, Mr. Maliki often works through the night in his Baghdad offices and has a steel-trap memory for dates, names and conversations. His family — wife, four daughters and a son — all live in Iraq, while many leading politicians have moved their families abroad.

If he eschews a cult of personality like that built by Mr. Hussein, his close control over Iraq’s police and army and his influence over the country’s judicial system have drawn calls that Mr. Maliki is becoming too powerful.

His government has come under criticism from rights groups for running secret jails, widespread abuses inside Iraq’s detention system, and for jailing political adversaries, such as journalists and demonstrators calling for government reforms.

In interviews, a handful of the people arrested in the recent Baathist sweeps spoke angrily about the justice system.

“It’s unbelievable,” said Abu Muamel Bahadli, 60, a retired teacher from Basra who was arrested. “They don’t have an idea about who is the real enemy. They also want to keep the people distracted from their corruption. I spent two weeks and then they released me without one question.”

Nearly nine years after the American invasion broke the Baath Party’s stranglehold on power, the specter of Baathism remains a ghost that Iraq cannot seem to exorcise. The Baath Party staged coups in 1963 and 1968 to seize power, and its persistent, if shadowy, presence in Sunni areas of the country offers a reminder that few Iraqi leaders leave office peacefully.

In late October, more than 100 professors at Tikrit University — in Mr. Hussein’s hometown — were fired for alleged Baathist connections.

“You can’t live in a democratic system in this way,” said former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a former Baathist himself who frequently clashes with the prime minister. “It is painful to see what is happening to this country.”

Despite strains of Sunni disenfranchisement, Sunni Arab politicians hold powerful posts in government, including speaker of Parliament, deputy prime minister and vice president. (A Kurd serves as president.)

And, as Mr. Maliki frequently points out in speeches, deadly vestiges of Mr. Hussein’s government do continue to stalk Iraq.

But when the Iraqi forces arrested former Baathists, they also hauled in suspects like Jasim Nusaif, a 71-year-old retired bureaucrat with high blood pressure and a tendency to faint on his morning walks to buy bread.

Mr. Nusaif’s wife and son said he was an employee in Iraq’s Water Ministry who was expelled from the Baath Party in the early 1980s for refusing to volunteer for the front lines in the grinding Iran-Iraq war. He retired from the government and worked for a while at a minibus depot.

Mostly, his family said, he now just collected his pension and read the newspapers at home in the heavily Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiya, a jumble of faded colonial mansions where bombs still rip through crowds.

“He’s old and he’s sick. He just sits in the garden,” said his son, Mohammed Jasim. “I can’t believe how a 71-year-old man could carry out a military coup against the government.”

2011-12-13T06:06:00.000-08:00

DES MOINES — Ann Romney switches off shrill TV coverage of the presidential race “all the time.” She is exasperated by the hyperpartisanship of the moment. As for the debates? “Listen,” she said in a rare interview here, “I don’t even want to go to the debates.”But with her husband’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination suddenly endangered by Newt Gingrich, Mrs. Romney is being deployed with a growing sense of urgency to do what her husband has been unwilling or unable to do this election season: offer voters a compelling, three-dimensional portrait of Mitt Romney.

As the Romney campaign has tried to regain ground, Mrs. Romney, 62, has appeared, over the last week, at four

events in Iowa, New Hampshire and Washington, offering what she calls “the other side of Mitt that you never hear about.”

In the process, she is drawing attention to a potentially powerful asset in a race against the twice-divorced Mr. Gingrich, especially in conservative states like Iowa: the Romneys’ unblemished marriage of 42 years.

In a suburban living room here a few days ago, amid platters of chicken salad tarts and red velvet cupcakes, Mrs. Romney brought a group of local women to tears describing how her husband has stood by her throughout her battle with multiple sclerosis, which once left her debilitatingly depressed and fatigued for months at a time.

“He is there, he is steadfast, you can count on him,” Mrs. Romney told the women. “He won’t abandon you in the hardest times.”

The message was not lost on the voters in the room.

“It says a lot about his character,” said Connie Schmett, who attended the event. “If he is not going to abandon his wife, he is not going to abandon his country.”

Mrs. Romney insists that she is not comparing her husband’s personal life with that of Mr. Gingrich, who is now married to his third wife, Callista.

“I have fond feelings for both Newt and Callista,” Mrs. Romney said. “And I am not going to make any judgment or any — I am never going to make any statement about that, on a personal level.”

Yet she conceded that her steady — and by all accounts, adoring — marriage could influence voters “if that matters to them,” adding: ”We are just who we are. We present who we are.”

Advisers to Mr. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, say privately that they believe that one of Mr. Gingrich’s biggest vulnerabilities is his marital history. He has acknowledged having had extramarital affairs, including with Callista, a chapter in his life that several Romney supporters said had colored their view of him.

“That’s the problem with Newt a little bit for me — infidelity,” said Ellen Thibodeau, 44, who showed up at a rally for Mr. Romney in Hudson, N.H., on Sunday. “My husband and I take our commitment to each other very seriously.”

Mrs. Romney’s newly higher profile, those close to her said, is the natural extension of the private role she has long played as her husband’s inseparable partner and essential touchstone. (Aides tell tales of Mr. Romney walking into a crowded room and seeming unsettled until he can locate his wife. “Where’s Ann?” he asks.)

Mrs. Romney, the daughter of a self-made businessman from Wales, began dating Mr. Romney during high school in Michigan, converted to Mormonism and married him at age 20.

His need to have her present has even trumped her dislike for the presidential debates. During commercial breaks at one in Des Moines on Saturday, Mr. Romney stepped down from the stage and walked into the audience to speak with his wife.

While she insists that she is not involved in day-to-day operations of the campaign, she acknowledges heavily influencing Mr. Romney’s biggest political decisions — especially to run for president this year.

Mr. Romney, she said, “was the one who was reluctant, much more reluctant, this time.”

“He was just thinking with his head,” she recalled. “This is what is involved, this is the process. This could happen, that could happen.”