MiddletownJournal.com

A year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a man of Middle Eastern descent named Hamoud H. Zaid walked into the Sharonville Red Roof Inn and said he wanted to rent a room. Zaid, of suburban Detroit, had no reservation, didn't know how long he'd be staying and paid in cash.

The suspicious motel clerk gave Zaid the keys to Room 206, then called the police.

That Dec. 30, 2002, phone call eventually led authorities to Ali Kareem Aladimi, 45, of Beavercreek, a man the United States government came to suspect of being a financier of terrorism with ties to Hamas.

A special narcotics unit staked out the motel and shadowed Zaid as he made four U-turns in attempts to shake any tails, then met with some big-rig truckers on a dead-end road in West Chester Twp. The cops watched as cargo was unloaded from a semi backed up to Bay 45 of the Twins Wholesale Inc. warehouse at 4610 Interstate Road.

Officers stopped the truck as it pulled away and caught a passenger who fled on foot. Then they executed a search warrant at the warehouse and found $54,000 worth of stolen Gerber baby formula. Zaid told police he was a middleman in the sale of the heisted goods from Memphis truckers to the owner of Twins Wholesale.

That owner was Aladimi. A native of Yemen and naturalized U.S. citizen, Aladimi was arrested Dec. 31, 2002, and has been in jail ever since. After years of legal maneuvers, he was permitted to withdraw from a plea bargain and is to stand trial in November on 63 federal counts. Held without bond in a jail in Kentucky, Aladimi has long declared his innocence.

Neither federal prosecutors nor Aladimi's current lawyer will say much about the case. But in court documents, federal prosecutors say the baby formula delivery that got Aladimi arrested is only a small part of a vast criminal enterprise that included:

• Trafficking "enormous quantities" of pseudoephedrine, the key ingredient in methamphetamine. Aladimi allegedly moved 5,000 kilograms of the drug, more than 250 times the amount that triggers the toughest sentences. Aladimi had a wholesalers license from the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, but prosecutors say he knew it was being used to make meth, and lied when he said he sold the drug to convenience stores.

• Structuring bank transactions in wire transfers under a $10,000 threshold to keep the banks from reporting them to the government. Mary Aladimi, Ali's wife of 20 years, bookkeeper and the mother of his six children, already has pleaded guilty to similar charges and has completed home detention and probation. She may testify against her husband, court documents show.

• Dealing in stolen baby food and formula. The feds say Aladimi used counterfeit printing dies to create packaging with the Similac, Enfamil and Isomil trade names, and had equipment to alter expiration dates. They say he then sold the stolen, counterfeit goods to stores or turned them in to manufacturers for refunds. Several Middle East natives have been arrested across the United States in recent years for dealing in stolen baby food, which is considered a low-risk means of generating cash.

• Wiring hundreds of thousands of dollars in crime proceeds to Yemen, which is an ally of the U.S. in the war on terror, but also is the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden and a hub of terrorist activities. The State Department has issued a travel advisory, saying "the security threat level remains high due to terrorist activities in Yemen." And more Guantanamo Bay detainees come from Yemen than from any other nation.

Aladimi isn't charged with funding terrorism, but with conspiracy to distribute dangerous drugs, money laundering, bank fraud and dealing in stolen goods.

When federal agents searched Aladimi's house at 2916 Forest Glen Court in Beavercreek in May 1999, they found $760,000 in cash packed in shrink-wrapped Clairol hair-coloring kits in the basement, "ready for bulk shipment overseas to Yemen," according to a U.S. Secret Service agent's affidavit.

Court records show Aladimi was born in Yemen on

Sept. 26, 1961. In 1982, his family sent him to college in North Dakota, where he met his future wife, Mary Rask. He graduated in 1988, and Aladimi was naturalized two years later. He started a grocery business in Fargo in 1991.

Aladimi entered the wholesale business — and began dealing in stolen and counterfeit goods, according to prosecutors — in 1993, when he opened Yemen Warehouse in the so-called Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul. He changed the name to Twins Wholesale in 1995 and moved part of the business to Ohio in 1997 or early 1998.

The Drug Enforcement Administration licensed Aladimi to buy and sell pseudoephedrine on June 30, 1998. According to court records, he bought more than $1.4 million of the drug from one supplier in less than a year. He claimed to have sold it to out-of-state convenience stores, but owners of dozens of the stores later told federal agents they never dealt with Aladimi.

Prior to Sept. 11, 2001, Aladimi tried to bring 25 Yemenis into the country, purportedly to produce a decorative glass product he'd patented, called Qamareya. U.S. District Judge Timothy Hogan later said that is "a huge red flag in today's environment."

Aladimi was first investigated in the mid-1990s, his former lawyer wrote, but suspicions about him intensified early in 1999 when the DEA was investigating a man named Mohamad Jafar for allegedly dealing illegally in pseudoephedrine. Aladimi was drawn into a sting operation involving a controlled buy with a confidential informant, court records show.

Raids on his home and warehouse followed, but no charges were filed in Ohio until after the 2002 baby formula bust. In an affidavit supporting a search warrant application, the DEA admitted it lost track of the pseudoephedrine in the case.

Aladimi did, however, face 2001 federal pseudoephedrine charges in California, which were dropped after his early 2003 indictments by federal grand juries in Cincinnati.

In August 2003, U.S. attorneys offered to drop most of the 63 counts if Aladimi would plead to three conspiracy charges and a new count of lending material support to terrorism. Aladimi refused.

Finally, in May 2004, Aladimi pleaded guilty to unlawful possession and distribution of pseudoephedrine, money laundering and transportation of stolen merchandise, which carries a prison sentence of more than 20 years. The government agreed to drop the remaining 60 counts and not charge Aladimi with financially supporting terrorists.

But Aladimi had to cooperate with the feds, who wanted him to name names of possible terror suspects in the U.S. They were disappointed in several interview sessions that summer, when Aladimi spent much of the time asserting his innocence and denying any terrorist connections. He said he only donated to a Yemeni organization supporting orphans.

According to notes from the sessions by his former attorney, William Gallagher of Cincinnati, FBI agents had detailed questions about specific groups and people. Officials also "asked Mr. Aladimi if he was aware of methods or means by which the mosque in West Chester collected donations. The government inquired specifically about whether donations were collected for Hamas or any other terrorist organization...." Aladimi said he knew one man asked for donations, the notes said, but "he has no knowledge of anything illegal."

In a June 2004 letter to Aladimi, Gallagher urged his client to cooperate with investigators. But Gallagher, who had advised Aladimi to plea bargain, also wrote to the Yemen embassy in Washington that July that his client couldn't have gotten a fair trial on terrorism charges.

"The idea of a man born in Yemen, accused of supporting terrorism and obtaining justice in the political environment in such a conservative white area as Cincinnati, is ludicrous," he wrote. Gallagher did not return a phone call seeking comment.

At a later interview session, in August 2004, Aladimi "maintained that not only was he innocent, but also that he was honest, decent and deserving of honor and respect in any society," Gallagher wrote. "In America, however, he said he has been humiliated, degraded and severely punished. The only crime he would admit to, day and night and five times a day, is that he is a Muslim and an Arab. He reiterated that if it were not for the government's threat of charging him with terrorism, he would not have pled guilty."

On Sept. 20, 2004, Aladimi asked the court to vacate his guilty pleas, which he said were obtained through threats and intimidation. The court twice denied his motion over the next two years.

Federal prosecutors in June 2006 told the court it would be unfair to grant Aladimi a trial because the government stopped its investigation after his plea bargain and the case had thus gone cold. At the time of the plea, they said, "agents had access to witnesses who could testify that Aladimi personally, and in coordination with confederates, provided substantial financial support for at least one foreign terrorist organization in the Middle East, Hamas."

They also said Aladimi tried to bribe one witness, and "certain potential witnesses have expressed fear of Aladimi, particularly regarding his influence in the Middle East, where the families of some witnesses reside." Some witnesses may have left the country.

U.S. District Judge Michael H. Watson initially rejected Aladimi's request to vacate his pleas, then reversed himself last September. The case is scheduled to go to trial

Nov. 26, with jury selection the preceding week.

Meanwhile, his co-defendants already have gone through the court process.

Mary Aladimi served four months of home detention and two years' probation, was fined $2,000 and forfeited $12,000.

Richard Shorter, the Memphis trucker involved in the 2002 baby formula heist, pleaded guilty to transporting stolen property and is serving his sentence.

And Hamoud Zaid served 10 months for his role in the baby formula scam, after which he was to be deported to Yemen. But in a "weird quirk," Zaid was released from jail prematurely, said Deputy U.S. Marshal Jon Loftis of Cincinnati.

"He hit the streets and was never heard from again."